Month: July 2000

Today Australia begins a new tax regime. No tax change has been subjected to so much publicity, information and misinformation. Much of that has centered around whether a partifular family configuration will be better or worse off under the new regime or whether a particular item will cost more of less under the new regime. They have been arid arguments of little moment centered around whether the Opposition or the Democrats might capture a few votes among a given class of people: motorists, caravan dwellers, tampon purchasers – and yes, the “”debate” went there, too – artists supplies or whatever.

Fundamentally, though, John Howard and his government have been right to tackle tax reform and implement fundamental changes. It was in the words of Sir Humphrey Appleby of “”Yes, Minister”” fame, a “”courageous decsion”. That was a euphemism for doing the right thing but at a cost of many votes. It was a euphemism for doing something that the well-informed knew was sensible and worthwhile but which was open to attack by opponents byu preying on the fear of change by the ignorant and ill-informed. It is so easy for an Opposition to be opportunistic when a Government engages in significant change. Oppositions know that those in favour of change will at best be lukewarm about it, while those against will be veciferous.
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Chief Minister Kate Carnell is within her rights not to resign following the defeat of her Government’s Budget yesterday. In the ACT the proper procedure for the removal of a Chief Minister is a formal vote of no-confidence in her with seven days’ notice. Members of the Legislative Assembly then focus on that issue. It may that such a motion arises out of the events surrounding the defeat of a Budget, but it need not necessarily flow.

Mrs Carnell still has some time up her sleeve. Under the Treasurer’s advance from last year’s Budget she can still legally keep the machinery of government going while she works a way through the impasse. The impasse was created after two MLAs who usually form part of her majority – Independents Dave Rugendyke and Paul Osborne – voted against her Budget because it contained a line item of $80,000 for a safe injecting place for heroin users. Their vote was illogical, unprincipled and has unnecessarily inflicted instability on the ACT. They should have followed the more principled and responsible approach of former Liberal and now United Canberra MLA, Trevor Kaine. Mr Kaine, like Mr Rugendyke and Mr Osborne, is an opponent of the safe injecting place. He put his views forcefully when the legislation to set it up was debated. The legislation was approved by a majority of the Assembly. He then accepted defeat gracefully and acknowledged the majority had the right to have the law put into effect. He did not seek to enforce a minority position on a single issue by threatening to vote a whole Budget down.
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The retirement of independent ACT Michael Moore and the movement to the crossbench of National Party MP Bob Katter highlight of the huge difference in potential between independents in the two jurisdictions.

Federally, an independent verges on the powerless. In the ACT, on the other hand an independent has the potential to be an enormous force against abuses of power by an the major parties.

Katter’s move to the backbench will change nothing. He could hardly be less forthright in his criticism of the direction of the Government. It is possible he will be even less influential as an independent because the media will no longer seek him out as a controversial person who kicks his own side.

In federal politics the lower house which determines the Government is elected on a single-member constituency basis. It verges on the impossible for a person to stand and win as an independent. In the past two decades, only Ted Mack, Peter Andren and Phil Cleary have stood for the House from nomination time as independents and been elected. Others have moved from major parties, like Katter. But with 147 or 148 members, the government of the day has usually had a majority that would subsume the three or four independents in the House.
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Former Chief Justice Gerard Brennan made some pertinent comments about our Constitution to this week.

He said, “The advice “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” might apply to plumbing, but not to the Constitution of a nation in a rapidly changing environment.”

He then outlined several elements of the Constitution which are definitely broke. These are not matters of everyday significance but they profoundly affect the administration of justice in Australia.

The framers of our Constitution did a first-rate job given the political and social and economic environment and of the time. But even they recognised that their creation would require occasional fixing up. That is why they provided for a mechanism to amend the Constitution that they created. Amendments require the assent of a majority of people in a majority of states. It was deliberately made difficult to get an amendment, but it has been made even more difficult by the fact that amendments can only be proposed by the federal parliament, which means in effect they have to be initiated by the federal government. And the federal government is made up of politicians who are more interested in the next election that the long-term framework of the Australian polity.
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Blackadder was justified be kinder to Shakespeare when he visited him a second in his time machine on Monday night. Earlier, he had castigated Shakespeare for being the scourge of every schoolboy. On the second visit he praised his prescience. A scene involving a time machine that was especially apt for Shakespeare, the playwright who transcends time.

On Friday morning on the ABC’s AM program, Treasurer Peter Costello, more than 400 years after the play had been written, was behaving just like Hamlet. It has been Costello’s outrageous fortune to have John Howard as his stubborn, resilient, accidental leader, preventing him from succeeding to a leadership which he thinks should be naturally his.Costello was being questioned about assertions in a new biography by Age journalist Shaun Carney that Costello thought that Howard was uncomfortable at some level with the prevalence of Asian faces in Australia, that Howard seemed lost in the prime ministership and by mid-1999 had unofficially retired.
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I was shocked. And it takes quite a lot to shock me. A friend I had known for more than 20 years was suggesting something. This friend is one of the world’s decent people. And yet on this occasion he was suggesting that a certain amount of corruption is a good thing.

Excuse me if I don’t give you the full details of names, countries and facts, but as the story unfolds it will be obvious why.

The friend, Friend One, and another friend, Friend Two, were sitting around the table and at the question of coastal development came up. I mentioned that the Carr Government had decided to take control of all development approval within a kilometre of the NSW coastline. I extolled one of my pet theories that the smaller the level of government, the higher the level of corruption. We have seen coastal shire councils dismissed on the grounds of corruption and state government administrators appointed to run the show for a year or two before a new democratic (and susceptible-to-corruption) council could be put into place.

I developed the theory a little further suggesting that the closer land is to places of attraction the more corrupt process of planning will be. And so if one has a small level of government near the wonderfully attractive NSW, corruption is bound to be rife.

It was then that Friend One in all up seriousness said, “but sometimes there is nothing wrong with a little corruption.”
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Nairobi the city was out of place. It seemed to be put upon the grassland. And sure enough as we drove in from the airport there was a giraffe in the grass a hundred metres from the road. In the distance were some skyscrapers in the misplaced smog. In town there were equally misplaced expatriate squash players and Hash House Harrier runners drinking beer and pink gins next to swimming-pools and behind a brick walls shielding them from the traffic, blackness and poverty without.

So Kenya is not a great big game park, but has a city with the office workers, traffic lights, shops, crowds and of restaurants.

And it is to a restaurant that I want to take you now.

I am now to break a self imposed taboo of some two and half decades and will attempt a restaurant review.
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You can go to a hundred zoos. You can look at a thousand animal calendars or posters. You can be utterly familiar with all their shapes and colours from films and nature documentaries. And still there is uncontainable, childish excitement at seeing, for the first time, the real thing – the big African mammals in the wild, in their own environment.

For a start, the roles are reversed. The animals have the huge expanse of the Serengeti plain and the vast floor of the Ngorongoro Crater. They are not in the enclosed box of a zoo’s cage or a television showing a documentary. The humans are caged inside safari Land-Rovers. Did the lions wonder if were ever allowed out of those small metal boxes into which we were crammed?

The walls of Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania form the natural boundary of one of the world’s greatest wildlife sanctuaries – home to about 20,000 large animals. Flamingos on the lake’s edge; lions hiding in the long grass; buffalo, elephant, half a dozen species of antelope, rhino and so

Every morning they have two sorts of visitors. A limited number of Maasai people are allowed to take their cattle down to drink in the lake before bringing them back before nightfall. And seven or eight white Land-Rovers each with up to eight tourists come down to shoot the wildlife. Their weapons are cameras, though some have telephoto lens almost as long as rifles. Each vehicle had a pop-up roof through which the caged tourists looked at the animals.
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