Month: January 2000

The Acting Prime Minister, John Anderson, was right to suggest that Australians should welcome the Queen and give her the respect of office. His prediction that the 45 per cent of people who voted for a republic would not use the visit from March 17 to April 2 as a focus for protest, however, was so obvious as to not be worth making.

Mr Anderson would be wrong to imagine that the welcome will be ecstatic, enthusiastic or especially warm. It will not excite the Australian population in the same way that the 1954 visit did.

The 45 per cent who voted for a republic, if affected at all by the visit, will look upon it much as a visit by any other head of state or head of government from another country. And many who voted No in the referendum will do likewise because they voted No to the republic on offer, but would otherwise have voted for a republic.

The Queen gets addition interest and respect for the fact that she is head of the Commonwealth of Nations of which Australia is part and she is head of state of the nation with whom Australia has very close ties of heritage, family and trade.

But those ties are becoming more diluted over time. Just after World War II the Anglo-Celtic share of the population was 90 per cent. By 1988 it had fallen to 74.5 per cent and in 1999 to 70 per cent, according to a study of ethic make-up of Australia by Charles Price published by Monash University last week.
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The ACT Government is on the right track with its road-safety program for young drivers, but it is a moot point whether the details of the program are well-directed. At present, people getting a driver’s licence (usually young people) at first get a provisional licence for three years. They also have a near-zero alcohol limit and lose their licence after four (rather than the usual 12) demerit points, putting their licence in greater jeopardy. For the first year they have to wear a P plate. But from August, provisional drivers will have to wear their P plates for three years.

Under the road-safety program young drivers will get a chance to remove their P plates up to 30 months early and increase to eight the number of demerit points required before they lose their licence. After six months on the road they can, for $60, undertake a three-hour discussion group on road-safety attitude and risks.

The course is a sensible idea and so is its timing. At six months, according to Urban Services road safety manager, Robin Anderson, drivers are becoming over-confident, complacent and had learnt bad habits from other drivers. All this is true enough. It is also sensible to provide a reward for doing the course. The question is the nature of the reward, and its timing.
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The board of the Reserve Bank meets every month. The critical item on the agenda each month is interest rates. Upon this decision lies the financial fate of lenders and borrowers across the nation, including mortgagors, self-funded retirees and business lenders and borrowers. The decision-making process is a fairly secret one. No minutes are kept. No reasons given publicly. There is just a result: either up, down or stay the same.

This week an outgoing member of the board, Adrian Pagan, called for reform so that board members could spend more time on monetary policy, especially interest rates. He called for higher pay so people with expertise and time would be attracted to the board members.

Professor Pagan is the sole academic member of the board. The other members are three ex-officio members – the Governor and Deputy Governor of the bank and the Federal Treasurer — and six others, at least five of whom must not be on the staff of the bank. At present all six are from outside the bank, which is fine. But five of the six are from business people. With the departure of Professor Pagan, there will be no academic. There is no-one from outside business to widen the board’s perspective. There should be. The bank has a responsibility to the whole Australian community. What is good for business, might not be good for the whole community. Certainly, the Government should look very carefully at who should replace Professor Pagan. It should not be a business person, because there are five existing business people on the board and a diversity of opinion is needed. It should be another academic or someone from outside business. The replacement for the other retiring board member, Treasury Secretary Ted Evans, is another matter. His replacement must be judged by who is the best person for the job as Treasury Secretary.
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Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.

If only the four major Churches which tendered and won large contracts to provide employment services to the unemployed had heeded the words of their own Saviour. But no, church bureaucracies have taken the running and church leaders have been unwilling or unable to intervene.

One of the hallmarks of bureaucracies is the desire for self-perpetuation, often not stopping to think why the organisation exists the first place. It is a rare day for a bureaucracy to announce that it has done its job and it should be wound up. To the contrary if one function is lost, they find another.

When the charitable agencies of the church tendered for contracts to provide the unemployed with help getting jobs, Church leaders failed to ask the fundamental question: what are we here for? Sure, the churches are there to help the poor, the dispossessed, the disabled and so on. Often that might include helping the unemployed. But it should not include entering into a formal contract with the government to provide expert job-searching services for the unemployed. That is an economic task, a task of government. It is not a charitable task. It is not a task done for love, but a task done for money.
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Democracy can be troublesome when it comes ot international diplomacy. It is proving troublesome in the negotiations between Israel (a democracy) and Syria (which has a totalitarian regime) with the United States (a democracy) as peacebroker.

President Assad of Syria has few restraints to what he might agree to during the present peace talsk with Israel in the United States. However, President Bill Clinton’s administration has to be wary of the Jewish vote, paticularly in New York. Though usually pro-Democrat, if Mr Clinton is seen as not supporting Israel enough, or is seen as agreeing with Israel to a sell-out, votes for Al Gore in the presidential race this year will be lost.

From the Israeli point of view, Prime Minister Ehud Barak has to content with die-hard ultra religious groups who do not want to surrender any of the Golan Heights which were captured from Syria in 1967. Unfortunately, for Mr Barak, his government is dependent on some ofthese groups for its majority in the Parliament. He has already given to blackmail by one religious party offering them millions of dollars for religious education in return for continued support.
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The move by ACT Attorney-General Gary Humphries to consider setting up an ACT Court of Appeal appears to be forced upon the ACT Government by the Commonwealth Government.

In the early days of the ACT, appeals went straight from the ACT Supreme Court to the High Court of Australia. After the creation of the Federal Court of Australia, appeals went to the Full Court of the Federal Court, typically of three judges.

As a general principle appeals are heard by more judges than at the level below, so any appeal from the ACT Supreme Court, typically a single-judge hearing, would have to be heard by a three judge panel.

Up to very recently, the present arrangements proved satisfactory. The ACT is, after all, a federal territory retaining the national capital and the Commonwealth has an interest in the judicial system here that it does not have in the states.

However, the arrangements are slowly coming unstuck. Under present arrangements it has been the practice that one of the ACT resident judges who also have commissions on the Federal Court sit on all appeals from the ACT Supreme Court. Before self-government, the Federal Government appointed all judges to the ACT Supreme Court. When it did so, the practice was that the new judge would be appointed also to the Federal Court. With dual comissions it was possible for an ACT resident judge to sit on appeals.
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The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre has said that Australia risked becoming an international joke if it accepted alleged death camp officer Konrad Kalejs following his expulsion from Britain. The Australian Government has quite rightly taken that risk. In the end, Australia will be seen as applying the rule of law to the case. Australian authorities require evidence before they can arbitrarily refuse entry to the country of one of its citizens. Australian authorities will require enough evidence to arrest and charge Mr Kalejs under the War Crimes Act or evidence that he obtained his Australian citizenship by fraud before it can be taken away so that he can be deported to Latvia. The Wiesenthal Centre alleges that Mr Kalejs, 86, was a member of a death squad in Latvia during World War II. In response, Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock says Australia will not be bullied into banning Mr Kalejs’ return.

Mr Ruddock is right. Australian citizenship carries with it a right of residence and a right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty. If Australian authorities deported a citizen, it would breach that right. Indeed, it would be stooping to the very arbitrary rule and abrogation of the rule of law that was so repulsive in the Nazi regime.

By all means Australian authorities should assess, as quickly as possible, whether Mr Kalejs obtained his citizenship by fraud and whether there is enough evidence to mount a case to revoke it. And Australian authorities should assess the evidence to make a war crimes charge. The latter, however, is fraught with difficulty. Britain, which has similar war-crimes laws as Australia and similar procedures for prosecution has not moved to arrest Mr Kalejs. It has moved to expel him, as it is entitled to do, merely on the ground that he is not a British citizen and therefore has no right of abode in Britain.
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The Howard Government has done much to change the $3.9 billion nursing home industry in Australia. This week saw the end of a 14-month accreditation period for federally funded nursing homes. The theory was that unless nursing homes met standards they would not get federal funding and presumably would be driven out. The result would be higher standards of care. The Government also did more to ensure that the cost of aged care is not borne solely by the taxpayer if the aged person had assets and income that could be used to help contribute to their own care. Before 1996 it seemed that the cost of nursing homes for the aged was getting out of hand with the aging population. Further, the standard of homes was not being effectively monitored. Something had to be done.

At the end of the 14-month accreditation period all but one of the 2950 nursing homes had been given accreditation and therefore funding. It sounds too good to be true. Surely, there were more bad homes in that number?
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Weather data for 1999 being published this week will probably cause less fuss than much of the economic data that is published through the year.

The latest data show that the 1990s was the warmest decade since 1910 when reliable records were made. Moreover, it is a steady increase since the 1960s, not a one-off event. The national annual mean temperature during the 1990s averaged 0.33°C higher than the average for the rolling 30-year reference period of 1961 to 1990. Compared to the beginning of the century, national annual average temperatures at the end are about 0.8°C higher. Five years during the 1990s were among Australia’s top 10 warmest years with 1998 being the warmest on record. Last year’s average maximum temperature was equal to the long-term average but the minimum was higher than average, as forecast.

The Australian experience is similar to that in the rest of the world. The 1990s was the hottest decade since instrument records began in the 1860s. And last year was the fifth warmest on record.

Increasingly, the evidence is showing that the world is warming. The question is whether the warming is being caused by increases in greenhouse gases, such as methane and carbon dioxide. The increase in greenhouse gases have come with industrialisation. These gases trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere.
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Russians and history may well forgive Boris Yeltsin his many sins because of his one triumph. He was the man who stood up to the tanks in 1991 and permitted democracy in Russia. In the wake of a failed coup against reformist communist leader Mihail Gorbachev. The hardline communists could easily have taken power had not Mr Yeltsin bravely climbed on the taken to demand peace. Events in China two years earlier are a clear reminder that democracy is not the inevitable winner when communist is defied.

After declaring the Russian Federation (one of the constituent parts of the Soviet Union) as independent, Mr Yeltsin paved the way for the other parts of the Soviet Empire to also break away to become independent states with varying degrees of democracy.

From that promising beginning, however, it was all down hill. In 1993, Yeltsin ordered the firing of shells from tanks into the parliament building when he could not get his way with opposition MPs. He then launched a disastrous invasion of Chechnya in 1995 which led to the death of thousands of civilians and thousands of young conscripts. All the while the Russian economy has suffered from a too-hasty transition to a full market economy and erratic decision-making in an attempt to curb the worst effects of the haste. The erratic decision making could often be put down to Mr Yeltsin’s habitual drunkenness. His trigger-happy dismissals of four Prime Ministers in as many years have added to a picture of a nation lurching like its leader from one crisis to the next.
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