Month: June 2000

The British Labour Party is basking in a richly undeserved landslide. At time of writing yesterday evening, Labour had 413 of the 634 seats decided. There are 659 seats in the House of Commons so it the results from 634 seats can be extrapolated with some accuracy.

Labour obtained 65.2 per cent of the seats in Thursday’s election. It did so on just 42.3 per cent of the vote. And given that there was a voter turnout of less than 65 per cent, Labor got just 28 per cent of the vote at of the national electorate. Yet it was declared by Prime Minister Tony Blair as a triumph and a landslide for Labour. It is amazing what an electoral system can do to translate votes into either a landslide or a cliff-hanger. Margaret Thatcher got similar small votes and large seat counts for the Conservatives in the 1980s

Meanwhile this time, the Conservatives got just 164 seats of the 628 declared by yesterday evening Australian time. That was 26.1 per cent of the total decided, and yet the Conservatives got 32.5 per cent of the vote. In short, Labor got nearly 40 percentage points more seats that the Conservatives yet got just 10 percentage points at more vote than them. (Contrast that to the conservative Liberal party getting 10 percentage points more than Labor in Ginninderra last ACT election, yet getting the same number fo seats.
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THIS week we learnt that house prices in the ACT had shot up in the year to the end of March. The median house price in the ACT at the end of March was $195,000 – – an 11.4 per cent increase over the year.

The ACT government must be licking its lips in glee. This is because with every increase in property values it gets a large windfall in increased stamp duty. The growth of stamp duty on house transfers in the past 20 years has been insidious. Governments which put their hands on their hearts and say watch my lips – “no higher taxes” — ignore the way the stamp duty system works. Unlike rates and land tax, there has been no significant adjustment in the progressive scale of stamp duty for 20 years. Now stamp duty is a huge rip-off by government, and falls erratically on the population who happen at to buy and real-estate any given year. The rate of stamp duty is now so high it must be acting as a deterrent to people moving into more suitable accommodation.

With rates and land tax, on the other hand, when property values go up the government strikes a lower rate in the dollar to compensate for that, so that the overall tax take remains about the same. The reason governments do this is because the broad population pays rates every year and if they went up too steeply there would be a voter backlash. However, stamp duty affects only a few people in any given year and so is not as voter sensitive.
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They are very frugal with their ski-lifts in New Zealand. Then the can afford to be.

Take Lake Ohau, for example. It has two baby pomas which don’t count and just one T-bar. But, oh, what a T-bar. It goes for a kilometre with a vertical lift of 425 metres. At the top the view makes you groan with awe. Mount Cook, New Zealand’s highest mountain is in the far distance of rows and dots of mountains. This one lift services permutations of ski runs. Virtually no-one was on it and it was $35 NZ a day ticket.

There are quite a few ski places like this in New Zealand. I hesitate to call them resorts, for that word conveys images of five-star hotels and the sterility of “”service”. These resorts are cute, friendly, country town and BMW-free. People go there to ski, not to be seen to ski.

Like most New Zealand skiing resorts, you cannot stay on the mountain. The trouble in New Zealand is that regular large dumps would make on-mountain live-in resorts very difficult. Places like Mount Hutt get snowed in for days on end, which would turn holiday schedules to chaos. So you have to drive up the mountain each day, or get a bus, either public or as part of a package.
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Immigration policy, without any official announcement has been dramatically changing.

Unlike previous years, not one person who arrived illegally by boat in Australia this year has been granted refugee status, according to latest departmental figures. The change comes amid growing hostility to illegal arrivals.

This week, Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock made public the fact that Australian taxpayers paid $55 million to support illegal boat people in the past nine months. The figures come after break-outs from immigration detention centres at Woomera, in South Australia, and Port Hedland and Curtin, in Western Australia.

The cost, in fact, is the least of the Government’s worries. $55 million sounds a lot but it is quite trivial on a governmental scale. On a per person annual scale, Australians are paying less than $4 per person per year to house illegal immigrants. Cheap at double the price. But the department and minister are engaging in tactics to engender public support for their detention policies. The message is that Australia faces floods of refugees and unless we are very tough there will be even more of them. Those we have cost enough, the message seems to be, so we cannot risk having many more, so support the get-tough policy.
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Dr Kerryn Phelps was elected as President of the Australian Medical Association on May 28, last year.

Between May 24 and June 6 this year, the Minister for Health Michael Wooldridge, made several statements which were reported on ABC Radio and various newspapers over whether certain drugs are being over prescribed , the extent to which the public should subsidise those drugs, and other medical matters.

On one occasion he said, “The majority of medical opinion is not with Dr Phelps, whose only qualification is in the media, not in any sort of specialist medical area. She is wrong on this.”

The radio interviewer pointed out that Dr Phelps was a qualified doctor, and Dr Wooldridge agreed. But he added that Dr Phelps disagrees with an independent scientific expert committee and “she is spreading dangerous information that will worry people unnecessarily and she should be condemned for it.”
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They mine the tourist lode. At all the key sites in Kathmandu, Pokhara and other cities, white faces attract persistent vendors. Many have come in from country areas to the glitter of the city. Others are refugees from Tibet, who have been in Nepal for up to 40 years. They sell a huge array of stuff: flutes, brassware, fossils from the Himalayas, fine wool scarfs, second-hand mountaineering and trekking equipment. The vendors work amid the layers of Hindu and Buddhist culture: the temples that attract the tourists in the first place.

Nepal is one of the poorest countries on earth, yet it is one of the most attractive for tourists. The magnet is Everest, the world’s highest mountain at 8848m. Every day, just after dawn, flights leave Kathmandu for the short distance to the Himalayas, they fly about 1500m below the height of the mountain, but very close. You could see a mountaineer. So close, but in a different world.

Nepal is no longer just a trekking, mountaineering and adventure destination. In the past couple of years, Nepal has tried to widen its tourist base for cultural tourism and sightseeing with the completion of several four and five star hotels and more frequent flights to Pokhara which provides the classic views of the Annapurna range of the Himalayas.
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Mount Everest from one of the by-the-hour sight-seeing flights from Kathmandu. They take you at about 7000 metres along the soputhern side of the Himalayan range.

Western tourist gets hassled by souvenir seller outside a Kathmandu temple.

Amid the trinketry on sale at Durbar Square in Kathmandu, you can find some solid brassware and a very useful kukurri knife.

A flute seller in the Themal market area of Kathmandu.

Rickshaw drivers wait for a fare.

Prayer wheels out side the Buddhist Kathesimbhu stupa Kathmandu.

A Buddhist monk at the Kathesimbhu stupa Kathmandu

Contortionist performs for tourists who have come to see funeral pyres along the Vishnumati river.

A man returns from market in Patan.

It began to drizzle when I arrived in Chiltern on Tuesday morning. My sister, Deborah, arrived from Melbourne at the same time and we met our younger brother, Simon, at the gate of my mother’s house.

“”It’s okay,” said Simon, “I’ve told her we’re going to Yarrawonga to get a dog.”

Me: “”You did what? What the hell did you tell her that for?”

Deborah: “”We can’t do that. We’ll have to tell her.”

But Simon had spent two nights a week with my mother for some years. He was right. But since when did older siblings take notice of the youngest.

Deborah, turning to Mum: “”Mum, Simon is going to Western Australia for a little time. He needs a holiday. We’re going to take you to Yarrawonga, just for a few days to see if you like it.”

Mum: “”I’m not going anywhere. I’m not spending a night anywhere but in my own house.”

Simon in an aside to me: “”Don’t worry, she’ll forget and we can start again with the dog. Don’t worry.”

Mum to me: “”You were here before weren’t you? You had glasses on.”

Me: “”No, Mum, I don’t wear glasses. I was here a couple of months ago.” (She recognised me then.)

Mum: “”When were you last here? You were here with glasses.”

Simon: “”Crispin doesn’t wear glasses.”

Mum: “”I’m not going anywhere.”

Deborah: “”Okay, let’s have some coffee.”
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Here we go again. That would be at the average person’s reaction to the slanging match between Prime Minister John Howard and Opposition Leader Kim Beazley this week.

Howard said, “The Opposition Leader must deliver clear Yes or No answers. The time for slithering and sliding, chameleon-like, according to the audience he is addressing, is over.”

And Beazley’s said, “[Howard] has been all over the place like a fruit bat over the course of the last six months, ladling money out to try and defend his political hopes.”

But far from worrying about degeneration into slanging matches, we should welcome these two epithets for the valuable understanding they give to the state of politics in Australia. They are deadly accurate descriptions of each leader. Taken together they provide a far more insight than the usual waffle and humbug.
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How refreshing it is to see one of the major political parties put out some detailed policy several months before an election. Deputy Labor leader Ted Quinlan issued a statement this week giving details of Labor’s rates policy should it attain office at the October election. The policy was not some motherhood waffle, rather it contained some new and interesting proposals. This is how politics should be. It will enable Labor’s political opponents, the media and the community at large to debate the proposals which in turn is likely to improve them.

Labor hit upon two salient points. First, rate rises are often erratic across the city. Secondly, large rises in property values in some suburbs can result in rate rises too large for some residents to bear. These are not new problems. Indeed, they plagued the the Carnell Government in the late 1990s. It had promised not to increase the total rates take by more than the consumer price index. It was greeted with howls of protest when residents in some suburbs were hit with larger-than-CPI increases while other suburbs had decreases. The Government sensibly introduced a system of a rolling three-year average. This ironed out some of the more glaring glitches but did not address the more fundamental trend – – namely that the value of land in the inner south and inner north has been rising at a far greater rate than the value of land elsewhere in Canberra. The Government attempted to address this by introducing a fixed-charge component of the rates bill, so that the total rates bill is less dependent on average unimproved values of land.
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