2000_01_january_cycle

This is ominous. The file on cycling (in our new-age paper-clipping library) can be found on the compactus arm with the heading “”A.C.T. ADMINISTRATION to CREMATORIUM”.

This week the Minister for Urban Services announced that $520,000 would be spent on cyclepaths. Fine. But let’s not repeat past mistakes.

I suspect that the people in charge of cyclepaths do not actually cycle. They couldn’t. Cyclepaths in Canberra must be designed by motorists, for the motorists.

No sane traffic engineer could possibly have got on to a bicycle and negotiated, for example, the concrete chicane in the median strip on the loop road that leads from Wentworth Avenue to King Avenue Bridge. Traffic zooms in both directions around the spaghetti loop to and from the bridge. The main around-the-lake bicycle path crosses this loop with the dreaded chicane in the median strip.

Ah, ah, says the engineer, who has never ridden a bicycle since he was eight, I’ll make it safe. I will build a great big concrete chicane in the median strip so that cyclists will have to weave left and then right so they will have to see if there are any cars coming in either direction.
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2000_01_january_count back news

The race to fill former Chief Minister Kate Carnell’s Legislative Assembly seat was throw wide open yesterday.

Until now the presumption was that Liberal Jacqui Burke would win the seat. But after close of counting yesterday, Liberal John Louttit is well ahead.

ACT Electoral Commissioner Phil Green issued figures at the close of the count yesterday with Mr Louttit on 6487 votes ahead of Mrs Burke on 3736 with Labor’s Marion Reilly next on 240 and the other seven candidates each this less than that.

Mr Green warned that these votes “”are not necessarily representative of the votes still to be counted and the relative order of the various candidates may change after further counting”.

Mr Louttit said yesterday, “”I didn’t go into this just for the fun of having my name in there.”

The seat is determined on a countback of the 25,379 ballot papers that marked Mrs Carnell as first preference. No other ballots are looked at. Under the ACT’s Hare-Clark system the aim is to find the candidate next most preferred by the people who voted for the retiring member. There are no by-elections for the ACT Legislative Assembly.
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2000_01_january_coral reefs

Imagine coming across in the wild a very large number of animals – together they might cover an area as big as an office carpark. In those circumstances, you would either flee in fear of the animals, or the animals would flee in fear of you.

That is, unless you are underwater and the animals are corals.

Most corals are like a like triffids in reverse. Instead of walking plants, they are stationary animals, at least most of the time.

They are exceptionally varied, diverse and beautiful. They are also threatened.

Only with the advancement of scuba diving in the past 30 years has the study of corals been possible in any great detail, though naming of species has been going on for at least two centuries. But barely have we had time to study, classify and understand corals in any detail and we are destroying them at an alarming rate. It has happened in our lifetime.

A new publication, for the first time, describes the corals of the world. It is an extraordinary work, in three volumes over 1382 pages with more than 4000 colour photographs. Corals of the World is by J. E. N. Veron and published by Australian Institute of Marine Science and CRR Qld Ltd. Mary Stafford-Smith is the Scientific Editor and Producer.
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2000_01_january_canberra create

Australia’s capital was conceived in acrimonious jealous, born in secrecy and was under-nourished for the first half-century of its life. Now it is one of the great creations of human endeavour.

In the 1890s the vision of federation spread across the continent. At that time, the question of a capital for the future federated colonies was hardly on the agenda. By the end of the decade it threatened to wreck the whole project.

At the constitutional conventions in 1890 in Melbourne and 1891 in Sydney the big questions were financial. NSW, the mother colony, was worried about having to pay the way of less prosperous colonies. Federation was much more popular in Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia than NSW. NSW wanted free trade and did not want too much regulation of the labour force. Victoria wanted protection for its manufacturing and strong federal powers over arbitration of working conditions.

The early drafts of the Constitution which arose from the unelected 1890 and 1891 conventions merely said that it would be a matter for the new Federal Parliament to determine where the federal capital should be, though the then anti-federalist William Lyne attempted to sow discord by suggesting that the Constitution should fix the place of the capital.
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2000_01_january_by-election not on

The replacement for retiring Member of the Legislative Assembly Kate Carnell has been chosen – the Liberal party’s Jacqui Burke.

Was the method by which she was chosen the best and fairest?

There are three methods of replacing retiring members of Parliament in Australia: the by-election (for the Lower Houses of the Commonwealth and all states and territories bar the ACT and Tasmania); party selection (for the Senate and some state Upper Houses) and the Hare-Clark count-back (for Tasmania and the ACT).

Jacqui Burke was chosen by the Hare-Clark count-back. Briefly, all the ballot papers which went to elect the retiring member are selected out and recounted to seek out who was next the preferred available candidate of those voters. It is the next “”available” candidate because the preference might first have gone to an existing sitting member or it might have gone to a candidate who no longer wants to take a seat in the Assembly – having lost at the general election a candidate might have found a new fulfilling life.

But why not have a by-election? Surely, a lot of people who voted for Kate Carnell in 1998 might well have changed their mind by January 2000?
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2000_01_january_break-out debate

The merits of having a new capital hewn out of the unpopulated wilderness as against having the capital in an existing city were tossed about by delegates in the Adelaide and Melbourne constitutional conventions of 1897 and 1898 with wonderful Victorian language:

Joseph Abbott (NSW): I think that the position of New South Wales is exactly the same as the position of the state of New York, the capital of which is Albany. The capital of the state of New York contains 91,000 inhabitants-that is, the legal capital of the state of New York-but the city of New York, with Brooklyn, which forms part of the same city, contains 2,500,000 inhabitants. Wherever you fix the capital of Federated Australia, I feel sure that the facilities of trade will fix the capital where those facilities are the greatest, and I am not at all concerned as to where the capital will be fixed as a matter of law, because I know where it will be as a matter of fact. As there is no other city with the facilities of Sydney, the capital will, de facto, be Sydney, although it may, de jure, be in Western Australia. I think it is a small thing to quarrel about, or devote our attention to at present. Representing New South Wales, I am perfectly prepared to leave it to the Federal Parliament to determine where the capital of the Commonwealth shall be.

Then there was this exchange:

Joseph Carruthers (NSW): We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that very good argument may be used against having the federal capital dissociated from those centres of trade and commerce and culture which exist in Australia. I, for one, look at the example which the United States has afforded us as one not worthy of being copied – to establish the capital almost in the wilderness, away from where commercial men, professional men, men of education, are wont to congregate, away from where their business keeps them together, and to set the affairs of the State, forsooth, to be conducted in some far distant place, where there are not those surroundings of civilization which tend to make life pleasant or to make society happy. I think that one of the results of establishing the capital of the United States at Washington, has been largely to divorce from political life some of the best elements of the community. We do not want to copy a mistake of that character. Let us contemplate for one moment the establishment of a federal capital, as has been proposed in some places, in the interior of Australia. There are many who advocate its establishment there on the ground that it will be easily defended.
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2000_01_january_boat people

This week Labor MP Andrew Theophanous called for all refugees who have been in detention more than 18 months to be freed.

The call highlights several developments in Australia’s immigration policy. For a start, the historic positions of the major parties have now been reversed. Early this century Labor was anti-immigration because it feared a migrant influx would create cheap labour and its voters — the white working class — would have to cop lower wages.

Then after World War II both parties were pro-immigration. Soon the migrant population formed a large part of the lower wage earners and became Labor voters. Labor took an interest in their concerns — one of which was family reunion and more migrants from their home countries. Add to this is the post-Whitlam educated Labor view — racial equality, diversity, civil rights etc. — and Labor becomes the migration party. The Hawke and Keating Governments had far higher migrant intakes than the Howard Government.

The conservatives, meanwhile, are no longer proponents of importing cheap labour to feed the capitalists’ factories, for the simple reason that the factories are not longer here. Indeed, the capitalists have moved the factories to the labour rather than the labour to the factories. And it is the Howard Government — not a Labor Government — that capitalises on the working-class battlers’ cry of jobs being taken by cheap migrant labour.

So this leaves us with a Government tough on immigration and a tough immigration Minister, in Philip Ruddock.
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2000_01_january_addendum8

In 1976 a persuasive latter-day Nostradamus convinced many people that Adelaide would be hit by a major earthquake. He cited the precise date. Panic set in. Many people backed their belongings and streamed out of Adelaide.

That afternoon, the Adelaide News, the now defunct afternoon paper, ran with a banner headline and poster for the newsagencies which screamed: IT DIDN’T HAPPEN!

Well, obviously, the newspaper came out.

It didn’t happen on December 31, 1999, either. But this time one newspaper reported it did. That evening 26,000 copies of The Canberra Times were printed. At the bottom of Page 1 was a small item stating: “”Preparation of The Canberra Times was affected early this morning by Y2K problems. As a result, we are unable to bring you today a special wrap-around showing Canberra moving into the New Year and our special First Word magazine. These will be distributed in The Canberra Times tomorrow.”

As we now know, the full paper came out on January 1 with splendid wrap around and the magazine. And the 26,000 “”it happened” copies were taken to the recycling bin, minus a few souvenired by staff.

Since then the letters column has bubbled over with outrage at the waste of $12 billion in Australia in fixing Y2K problems. The money would have been better spent on hospitals, schools and roads, the argument ran.
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2000_01_january_addendum29

Before Privacy laws spoiled all the fun, a great ritual was played out on a walls of the Chifley library at the ANU in the first week of December.

Half a dozen minions of the university administration would walk across the library lawn carried large boards with lists of everyone’s exam results.

Names, subjects, successes and failures were there for all the world to see. Students milled around and surged to the boards. Squeals, moans (made more poignant if failure meant no more study deferral for national service) muttered commiserations and hearty congratulations flowed. We then adjourned to the Union Bar with occasional returns to the results board when an absent friend was remembered.

And there were many absent friends who returned to homes out of Canberra to bludge on parents or for holiday jobs.

The absent friends, though, were catered for by The Canberra Times which in those days published the whole list, all keyed in by linotype operators with lead output checked against original paper.

Incidentally, that is the true meaning of proof-reading — where one person reads what has been re-keyed against an original version. It is not to be confused with editing (called sub-editing in newspaper not to confuse the role with the editor’s more general task). With editing there is only one original version which the editor changes, correcting grammar, spelling, sense etc.
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2000_01_january_addendum27

It is an election year in Australia. Three states, starting with Western Australia and Queensland next month, both territories and the Commonwealth all have elections.

In all of these elections, the vast majority of people will get most of their information about the candidates and their parties from the media. The exception is perhaps the Northern Territory. It has a single-member system in a tiny population. This results in electorates of only several thousand voters. A hard-working candidate in an urban seat could talk to almost every voter in an election year – it would only be ten a day.

Even in the tiny ACT, the media will play the crucial role in giving voters the raw material upon which to base their decisions.

It means politicians will have to rely on media outlets to get their message across. As that happens, the media will put each politicians’ message in context – in context of what the other side is doing, on what the politician’s own side is doing, on what that politician said in the past, on what that politician or his side of politics said in another geographic area. When that happens a simple message by one politician that this little pocket of Australia will get this goodie, will get (in the view of the politician) warped. One goodie given here is one less given there. A goodie for one group (land-clearing for farmers) is a horror for another (greenies).

In short, as each politician tries to be all things to all people, the media will point out the inconsistencies and contradictions.
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