Month: February 2000

Upmarket restaurant 11400 ft

Night sky. Groomed green light.

Beaver ck 200yo over built pretends to be Europe. Fairy lights one every small tree. 5-storey condos. Very rich (see RE ads) come here by skiiing is the great equaliser. Skiiinig ability has to be learnt, or partly comes naturally. It cannot be bought.

Odd scultures of 100 years ago or more. Lots of old and pseudo-old (as distinct from antique) furniture. Every painting seems to be an old master with dark brown wioth ornate gold frame. Trying to add age to a resort which is glaringly new and should be pround of it.

Prime Minister John Howard has said the United Nations should butt out of the debate in Australia over mandatory sentencing. In doing so he, like heads of government in Australia of all persuasions, gets into a tangle of jurisdiction, principle and political expediency.

Mr Howard said that it was up to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan whether he wanted to raise the question of mandatory sentencing. He told ABC Radio, “”Australia decides what happens in this country through the laws and the parliaments of Australia. I mean in the end we are not told what to do by anybody. We make our own moral judgments. . . . The suggestion that in some way we are accountable to the rest of the world for something like this given the human rights record of this country. . . . Australia’s human rights reputation compared with the rest of the world is quite magnificent. We’ve had our blemishes and we’ve made our errors and I’m not saying we’re perfect. But I’m not going to cop this country’s human rights name being tarnished in the context of a domestic political argument.”
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In Australian law, the accused has the right to remain silent. And in most Australian jurisdictions, judges are not allowed to tell juries that they can draw inferences from silence. In the remaining jurisdictions, judges are only permitted very limited comment on the accused’s silence. Earlier this month, the High Court quashed the conviction of a man because it said the trial judge (in NSW) had over-stepped the mark.

The theory is that the right to silence and the right not to have juries draw inferences from silence are important for liberty and justice. You have to wonder. Outside the court system, people in everyday life learn about things precisely because they ask questions of people and draw inferences if they do not provide answers. It is a typical method of finding the truth by parents with children; teachers with pupils and employers with employees. But when it comes to the criminal law we get very precious.
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A direct election for the head of state is a rusted on opinion. It is not going to be changed, so people wanting a republic may as well start drafting their new models from that base position.

The rusted-on nature of the direct election is evident from research to be published next week in the Australian Social Monitor by Professor Jonathan Kelley of the ANU, Bruce Headley and M. D. R. Evans of Melbourne University and Malcolm Mearns, principal of the Canberra research firm Datacol.

The reserachers have cruched a lot of numbers and have come up with some surprising and significant results about Australains’ opinion on the monarchy and republic. Giventhe Opposition Leader Kim Beazley says the republic will beackon the agenda if Labor wins the election, Professor Kelley’s results are well worth looking at.

Their research (which can be viewed from mid-week at www.social-monitor.com) starts with some historic crunch poitns in the debate. The first was in 1980 when the number of people who thought the Queen and the Royal Family were fairly or very important to Australia fell below 50 per cent. That fell below a third in 1994 and has remain below a third ever since.

The second crunch point came between 1990 and 1994 when a majority thought Australia should be a republic with its own head of state rather than having the Queen. It has remained over 60 per cent ever since. The last crunch point is the subject of the most recent detailed research. That reveals the rusted-on nature of support for a direct election, most critically that support comes from across age and sociao-economic groups.
Continue reading “2000_02_february_republic research”

So, the ACT has one of the highest rate of car theft in the land and the most costly delivery of health care.

This, and a myriad of other measurements came out this week courtesy of the fifth Productivity Commission report on government services.

This year the report showed that the ACT has among the shortest wait for public housing, the least spent on traffic enforcement, the best ambulance response times, the longest wait for aged care places, the most expensive child care and so on.

The report goes into searching detail to answer questions on how much, how many and how quickly. But it does not answer the question why the differences occur or what should be done about them. The report is quite open about that. Those are matters for the state and territory governments to deal with.

The car-theft statistic is a case in point. When we have such comparitively low levels of crime in general, why is car theft high? And what should be done about it? Mandatory life sentences for car theft, surely.

Thinking a little more deeply, what is peculiar about Canberra that might make car theft more prevalent. Well, Canberra has a rule against fron fences. It makes cars in driveways more exposed. It might be the price we pay for our beautiful suburbs.
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The Western Australian and Queensland elections have made some Coalition MPs ponder supping with the Devil. They are thinking of doing a preference deal with One Nation.

National De-Anne Kelly summed up the position: “”If you’re part of the same sort of conservative, right-wing family, if you don’t share preferences, you are dead in the dust.”

And the Liberal Member for Eden-Monaro, Gary Nairn, is making similar noises.

Hitherto, the importance of preferences has been grossly exaggerated, but next election it might be different, based more on the result in Western Australia than Queensland.

In 1996, preferences decided 50 of the 148 seats. In 1998 they decided 91 seats – an historically high proportion. In fact they made little difference. Of the 91 seats in 1998 the leader after the first-preference count stayed leader in all but three cases after the distribution of preferences. (This is counting the Coalition as a single party.) Still, despite the high number of seats determined by preferences, the preference count did not affect the outcome of either election.

Hitherto it has taken freak circumstances for preferences to affect the overall outcome. It happened in 1961 when DLP preferences gave the Coalition a victory that would otherwise have been Labor’s. And in 1990 preferences gave a Coalition candidate’s lead on the first-preference count to Labor, changing the election outcome.
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AN ADVERTISEMENT the other day said something like, “Wanted. Dentist. etc etc.” And I thought, I don’t want to be a dentist, so I won’t apply.

Yet, there is an open advertisement in our democracy for anyone to seek elected office. And I saw in the paper the other day that someone wanted to apply.

But this person had a very peculiar view. The elected office was to be one of the 17 people elected by the 150,000 voters in the ACT. The job is that of politician. How surprising, then, that this person who wanted to be elected office to the job of politician said, “”But I’m not interested in becoming your typical politician.”

His name is Mal Meninga. He went into football and became a footballer, but wants to go into politics and somehow not be a politician. It is bizarre. If you stand for elected office, you become a politician. If you don’t want to be a politician, you should not stand.

It would be nice to think that Meninga and his advisers are falling into the trap of fighting the next election on the basis of previous ones when any One Nation or independent could get votes by merely kicking the majors but that the electorate had re-educated itself and would not fall for such simplistic drivel. It would be nice to think the ACT electorate would not accept statements like: “”I am not from the major parties. I am just an ordinary person and I want to make commonsense decisions for ordinary people.” It would be nice to think that voters would demand some detail.
Continue reading “2000_02_february_meninga forum”

Alas not many children will see the program on McDonald’s on Cutting Edge on Tuesday.

It is on SBS. It is serious. It does not come in the colourful short bites that children love, irrespective of content.

But it is before their bedtime, starting at 8.30pm.

The program is on what has become known as the McLibel case, the longest trial in English history. McDonald’s sued David Morris and Helen Steel after they persisted with a pamphlet campaign outside McDonald’s in London. McDonald’s $5000-a-day barrister estimated the case would take about 2 and a half weeks. It took two and a half years. Morris and Steel represented themselves but as more became known about the case, many witnesses and people with legal skills volunteered to help.

Under English (and Australian) law all the onus is on the publisher to prove the truth of everything published.

As on commentator said on the program, there is no freedom of speech, only an appearance of freedom of speech.

This is a David (and Helen) vs Goliath story.
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Mandatory minimum sentences present judges with a horrible dilemma. They are sworn to uphold the law and to do justice. But with mandatory minimum sentences judges cannot do both.

In the Northern Territory, the judges have attacked against mandatory sentencing, and in doing so have revealed their anguish. Not all Northern Territorians are red necks. Indeed, the fact that these laws are in force there has brought out the territory’s civil liberties proponents.

Justice Dean Mildren of the Northern Territory Supreme Court has spoken eloquently against mandatory sentences since they began in March 1997.

In a case last year he said, “”Prescribed minimum mandatory sentencing provisions are the very antithesis of just sentences. If a court thinks that a proper just sentence is the prescribed minimum or more, the minimum prescribed penalty is unnecessary. It therefore follows that the sole purpose of a prescribed minimum mandatory sentencing regime is to require sentencers to impose heavier sentences than would be proper according to the justice of the case.”
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