Month: May 2000

This week saw the great tax spat. It began with the Labor Party in difficulty over the merest hint of a slight suggestion that it could it possibly leave itself open to looking at increasing some taxes at some it indeterminate period in the future. This was followed by an utter denial by Labour leader Kim Beazley that Labor would increase any tax ever. And that was followed by Prime Minister John Howard matching the promise with one of his own that the coalition would never increase taxes – – to be later qualified, it would seem, as not increasing any core taxes. This was accompanied with that the bombastic claims by Howard that his tax cuts that came with the GST were greater as a percentage of GDP than those given by President Bush in the United States.

It was only so much humbug by two political parties that over the past several decades have engaged in a charade of allowing inflation to silently increase taxes for them and then to grandstand with false generosity by making much of winding back the silent tax rises by calling them tax cuts.

The present government has engaged in even worse humbug by imposing higher indirect taxes in the form of a GST and pretending to more than compensate by giving “cuts” in income taxes. However, the figures presented in the Budget papers and other figures give the lie to this pseudo-generosity.
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Peake – trunk 60

Jackson — health elements of regional policy 50

Armitage – ACT key elements 35-40

Hull – glance

Page 2: reaction. Largely aap and subs. Spills.

Hull – Leader

Liftout

P25: Lead Macklin Rural roundup. 50 Sharpe.

Burgess: PS overall. 50 CSIRO cuts. 40 AGs cuts. 45 AFP cuts 35

P26: Deforest. Rural pic story. Lead Armitage ACT expanded. 40-50

P27: Lead Lawson Border security immigration. 45 Wright Defence. 35 Foreign Aid (stock pic) 30

P28: Deforest Education pic story. Macdonald Tertiaty ed plus research 60 Secondary ed. 40

P29: Deforest Aged care pic story. Lawson Work program for aged and means test 45. Dixon Means testing. 40 Super. 40

P30: Wright Spectrum and debt 40. Burgess Risks liabs 30. Musa Communications 35. Arts 35. Macklin Sport 25

P31: Families pic story Deforest. Jackson rest of health 50. Lawson Child support 40.

P32: Urban eco cycle + 2 graphs. Peake comment. Big graphs. Coleman 75 fed state. political funding

P33: Costello speech.

JUST what is the rural and regional Australia that we are hearing so much about? Does it approximate the shaded area of the adjacent map? If so, we are looking at just 15 seats. It is a lot of money for 10 per cent of the electorate.

Take out another 15 seats and you have only capital-city seats plus Tasmania and a few near-capital seats.

The way the leaders of the major parties are talking, you would think that rural and regional Australia is half the population. In fact, it is less than 20 per cent, though it does have 90 per cent of the area.

When you look at the seats that all this effort is being put into, it is bizarre. Only three of the first 15 mentioned are even remotely marginal – that is requiring a swing of less than 5 per cent. The other 12 are dead-safe Coalition seats.

Let’s go to the next 15 seats out to see whether this politically generated rural-urban divide is justified. Quite a few of these seats are indeed marginal – at least in Queensland, NSW and Victoria. In Queensland they are marginal seats because there is an Labor urban base pitted against a rural hinterland. The seats of Herbert, Dawson and Hinkler are each centred a moderate sized city – Townsville, Mackay and Gladstone, respectively. The trap here is that the more a political party plays the to the tune of the rural, isolated rusticate, the more it will alienate the city dwellers in that electorate.
Continue reading “2000_05_may_rural and regional”

There must be another event on. Perhaps something on the Futsal slab, or at Regatta Point. It was Sunday morning at 11.30. Perhaps something at the Bishop’s house. There were a lot of cars and the number seemed to be swelling.

I had three reasons for being on the northern side of Commonwealth Avenue Bridge. The first was reconciliation. As a white Australia I would like to see the Government that represents me make a statement that it and we are sorry for past injustices to the indigenous people of Australia. Why now, and not earlier in our history? Because of the report by Sir Ronald Wilson into the Stolen Generations. Sure, you can quibble over the some of evidentiary details like former Aboriginal Affairs Minister Peter Howson, but the tale is essentially true: a huge number of Aboriginal children were taken from their parents to be assimilated into white society.

Coming from the southside I turned under the bridge and into the Regatta Point carpark. I was early. Before long the left lane both north and southbound of the bridge were at a standstill. So what else was going on here? It was extraordinarily cold. The lowest May maximum on record. Despite the mythology of negative minimum temperatures advertised to the rest of Australia every winter’s news bulletin, Canberra is not a cold city. It has low wind and high winter daytime temperatures. Who cares if it is minus 3 at 3am? But plus 4 in the middle of the day is bitter. And still the crowd built up.

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The Liberal minority Government would stand or fall on its Budget, the Chief Minister Kate Carnell told the national Press Club yesterday.

She said it was an all-or-nothing matter and her Government would not allow the Budget to be picked over line by line by the cross-benches.

“”That’s the way we have always played it, and there’s nothing different this year,” she said.

The statement came as three cross-benchers and the Labor Opposition have attacked elements of the Budget and the Labor. Together they would form a majority.

Mrs Carnell said also that the decision by Prime Minister John Howard not to live in Canberra had cost the territory jobs.

“”A lot of things, like meetings, that used to happen in Canberra now go to Sydney,” she said. “”That is bad for the city and it sends a bad message. . . .

“”There is not doubt it has cost money coming into the ACT and money means jobs.”
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Communication Minimiser Richard Alston: We can’t run the company’s business for it. It would be I think the most chilling effect on competition and the operation of the marketplace if you were to go in there and second guess the business and say, you should not buy this; you should not sell that; or you should do something else. I mean that’s just not real life. What we do is we provide subsidies such as the customer service guarantee arrangement, such as the universal service obligation, such as price caps. In a whole range of areas we apply community standards to telephone services. But we don’t try and tell businesses how to run particular parts of the operation.

The above quotation is taken from Senator Alston on the ABC programme AM yesterday morning. It is an explanation of why it is not the Government’s fault that telecommunications company One.Tel appears to have gone belly up. One its own it might be a perfectly reasonable statement of Government policy. In the context of what the Government has been doing in the telecommunications portfolio in the past six years, it is a damning piece of inconsistency. Indeed, it encapsulates all the worst elements of this Government’s communications policy.
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Fraser a Gorton supporter (like costello to Howard) esp over significant policy Cw state rels seabed legislation (made after 69 election without mention during campaign) …. But critic quietly about Gorton brow-beating brash way esp unilateral decision to go ahead without states even though Min for Nat Dev, David faribairn todl states cw wd not move without further consultation. 1970.

Feb 2, 1971, challenge by sen Ian Wood (grassroots queenslander) no seconder. March 10, 1971, he was out.

Harry Turner (noth shore seat)… told party meeting Gorton was secretive and offhand in formulating policies. Instead of white paper public and party comment method.
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The threat by Independent MLA Dave Rugendyke to block the ACT Government’s Budget over safe injecting rooms is dangerous twaddle. Mr Rugendyke says he cannot in conscience vote for a Budget which contains money for a safe-injecting room.

His stand is twaddle because although the Budget papers show a notional allocation of $80,000 for a safe-injecting room, the Appropriation Bill that Mr Rugendyke will be voting on does not mention the safe-injecting room. It just has an overall health Budget.

His stand is dangerous because it is a form of blackmail, which if taken to its logical end will make government in this territory unworkable. Under present proportional electoral arrangements we will always have minority government. We could change that by the single-seat system in this small territory would provide clean sweeps of all or nearly all seats by the party that gets the most votes. There would be no effective opposition, such that Mr Rugendyke provides, which would be unhealthy.
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The Fijian great Council of Chiefs should have realised that they were dealing with an erratic, criminal, megalomaniac when they sat down to discuss the demands of George Speight. Instead they treated him seriously as a person to be negotiated with. It was a foolish mistake and now the council and all Fijians are paying for it. Speight was not a man to be negotiated with, except on a pretend basis to get his hostages released, after which he could be arrested and tried for kidnapping a violence.

Having negotiated with him, Speight has continued to increase his demands. The council has betrayed Fiji by acceding to Speight’s demand that Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry – a man that Speight holds at gunpoint — be forced from office. This is an appalling turn of events, not just for Fiji but for democracy in other South Pacific countries. The Australian Government has rightly denounced the developments and announced measures that will be taken if constitutional government is not restored. The Papua New Guinea Government has been far too weak in its reaction. A clear message needs to be sent that political and constitutional change cannot legitimately arise from the barrel of a gun. Once it is permitted, no South Pacific Government is safe. Any disgruntled group with a significant number of backers could force any government from office.
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There is enormous symbolism in the proposal by the Federal Government to put a reconciliation square in the Parliamentary Triangle. Squares do not fit into triangles – at least not in this instance. The timing is difficult. The failure of the Federal Government to say sorry and the enormous tension and anger that has created among indigenous people and among people who want the Australian Government to say sorry on their behalf makes this gesture look like an excuse for a patch up. Worse than that, it looks like an excuse to get rid of the Aboriginal Embassy outside Old Parliament House. The embassy – shabby and makeshift as it is — is a symbolic reminder of the inequality of living conditions between many indigenous people and their non-indigenous fellow citizens.

The Minister for Reconciliation, Philip Ruddock, says that there would be no attempt to subsume the embassy if indigenous people did not want it. But several government ministers, in particular the Minister for Territories, Senator Ian Macdonald, have expressed their desire to see it go.

One can only hope that the deputy chair of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Sir Gustav Nossal, is right when he calls it a magnificent gesture, and that this is not a cynical first step towards removing the embassy before conditions in Australia would warrant the embassy’s replacement by a reconciliation square that marked actual reconciliation, not mere hope for it unmatched by deeds.

When that happens placement of the square in the Parliamentary Triangle – the heart of the nation – will evoke the right symbolism.