Month: January 2000

Steve Ellis, of Hackett, has written in with a list of requests for 2000 including one asking: “”Can the letters to the editor page be declared an R. S. Gilbert-free zone for a little while?

“”You presumably receive many more letters than you can publish, so why not give someone else a go?”

They are fair enough questions. I would love to give someone else a go. But by and large the rejected letters are self-rejecting. They get rejected on the usual grounds: too long; illegible; illogical; illiterate; irrelevant; obscene; a similar letter has already run; or no address.

Letters from regulars — like R. S. Gilbert, John Cleland, Bob Steege, Mike O’Shaughnessy — are the only ones rejected on the grounds of objection against the person who wrote them. Some letters written by R. S. Gilbert are indeed rejected purely on the ground that they are written by R. S. Gilbert, because he has others approved still in the system. Otherwise they would be eminently publishable.

Letter selection is usually done by me, Editor Jack Waterford or Associated Editor Penelope Layland. We tend to read the content and mentally accept or reject before we see who has written the letter. Most people sign at the bottom of the letter.

By and large we will always publish a well-written, pertinent (or better still, impertinent) letter under 250 words. But there are ebbs and flows of letters. The number will drop over school holidays and public holidays. The number will rise if there is a hot issue running.
Continue reading “2000_01_january_addendum15”

Emma Macdonald was quite cross last week.

She had written a column for the Summer Page. The Summer Page runs in January to add bulk to the paper and fill the space between the saying advertisements. It is also there to occupy people who take January off down the coast. There is some light entertainment and the soft read.

Macdonald’s column was a beautifully written tale about a possum that lived in her fire box. She got e-mails and letters saying what a wonderful piece and litanies from people telling her how possums should be removed, fed, cared for or exterminated.

So a fuming Emma came into the office, “” I write all this important stuff about the education of people’s kids, for Christ’ sake, and no-one says a word. I write a shitty little piece about a bloody possum and all these people write in saying . . . .””

(Sorry, journalists tend to speak with the expletives undeleted and undiluted.)

She was too cross to finish the sentence.

I tried to console her by relating a story about Bruce Juddery. One day Juddery wrote an hilarious column about driving back from the South Coast in a very unreliable Volkswagen.
Continue reading “2000_01_january_addendum jan20”

By-election for the seat in Molonglo vacated by Kate Carnell got under way yesterday. People enrolled in Molonglo will not vote, simply because they have already voted – in February 1998.

Under the ACT’s Hare-Clark system we do not have a new election every time a seat is vacated. Rather we have a count-back of the vote cast at the previous general election. The Electoral Commissioner looks at all the ballot papers that helped elect the vacating member. All the unsuccessful candidates at the previous general election can stand for the vacancy. The aim is to see who among the unsuccessful candidates is the next most favoured candidate of voters who had elected the vacating member.

In this instance, the commissioner will look only at the 25,379 ballot papers that were marked Carnell 1. The preferences indicated on those ballot papers are then followed through to the first available standing candidate. So a ballot marked Carnell 1, Humphries 2, Cornwell 3, Tolley 4, O’Keefe 4, Burke 5, Louttit 6, would be a vote for Burke because Humphries and Cornwell are already elected and O’Keefe and Tolley who were unsuccessful in 1998 are not standing for this vacancy. A ballot marked Carnell 1, Louttit 2, would be a vote for Louttit.

(The original 1998 votes of the contesting candidates, bear in mind, are not part of this process.)

If a candidate gets over 50 per cent of the available vote, he or she is elected. Otherwise the candidates with the least vote is excluded and preferences distributed, House of Representatives style.
Continue reading “2000_01_january_act count”