Month: August 2000

Federal Court judge Justice Maurice O’Loughlin said it – as it were – in black and white.

Yesterday’s decision in the Federal Court was not a resolution of the question of the stolen generations. Nor was it a resolution of the question of whether there should be a national apology to those of the stolen generations.

It never could be. Courts are not capable of doing that. All they can do is decide cases brought before them and rule in favour or one part or the other.

The Federal Court, of its nature, was not capable of doing what many had hoped: to spell out why their should be an apology.

Justice O’Loughlin accepted that the two members of the stolen generations Lorna Cubillo, 62, and Peter Gunner, 53, were taken from their mothers in the 1950s and that Ms Cubillo had been viciously assaulted by a missionary while in a white institution.

The question for the judge was whether this removal could lead to a successful claim of damages by these two (and only these two) members of the stolen generation. Was the removal a breach of the law at the time; was it false imprisonment; was the Commonwealth, as administrator of the Northern Territory at the time, liable to pay damages?
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Get a pin an put it in the centre of a map of Papua New Guinea. There you will find Tari, population 900.

Wantok. Payback.

, with an airstrip that can take a

For Americans, Papua New Guinea is an exotic, exciting and culturally rich place.

“”Try telling that to Australians,” says Bob Bates, ex-patriate Australian owner of Ambua Lodge in the PNG Highlands.

For Australians, the place is a violent, Third World hell-hole.

The typical response I got when telling of a pending PNG trip was, “”I wouldn’t go there.”

Americans are in blissful ignorance. Virtually no news from PNG goes to America, so their image of the place is straight out of National Geographic. Australians, being closer and more involved, get a steady news diet of violence, coup attempts, political instability, corruption and environmental rape. Stories include the recent daring raid on Port Moresby’s main bank by five or six armed men in a hijacked helicopter which resulted in most of the raiders being shot dead by police.

As a result of the poor press, few Australians go to PNG as tourists. Bates gets more people from Finland staying at his lodge than Australians.

On this occasion, the truth does not lie somewhere in the middle. It lies at both ends. PNG is a violent place laced with corruption. It is also an exotic, culturally diverse and idyllic place where people go out of their way to help.
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Fact file

Qantas flies from Sydney into Port Moresby most days and Air Niugini flies from Cairns into Port Moresby several times a week. Air Niugini flies to Tari five times a week.

Ambua Lodge has western-style facilities but done sympathetically with local material. Each room is a separate hut with thatched roof and bamboo-mat walls with 180-degree windows overlooking the valley, each with en-suite bathroom. A large main dining lounge room is done a similar way. It has a unique orchid collection and organises rainforest and village cultural tours. More information: www.pngtours.com/lodge1.html

ends

20a…. Two young men who have grown their hair for more than a year to make a traditional Huli wig with their teacher, left, who is wearing a wig decorated with feathers from the bird of paradise and the cassowary.
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My GP makes splendid use of computers. He keys in information during consultation. If he issues a prescription, or referral to imaging, pathology or other specialist it prints from his computer. Given the chronically appalling nature of the average GP’s handwriting, I have greater confidence that the pharmacist will not misread quantities or drugs from the printed script than a handwritten one. Given he backs-up daily, I am also more confident he will be able to recall pertinent parts of medical history more easily than shuffling through paper and he certainly can retrieve my file instantaneously on the screen in front of him if I phone him whereas a GP dependant on a paper file has to wait for someone to retrieve it.

But this is only part of the story. It should go further, but does not. There is an enormous lost opportunity here. The information is held in my GP’s hard drive and goes no further.

Many doctors would think this is a good thing. Some argue that the doctor and not the patient owns the information. Most doctors argue that patient-doctor confidentiality is essential to good medicine, and no information should leave the surgery without the consent of the patient. True, up to a point, but there is another way of looking at it.
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The joint statement by three ministers on the way the United Nations deals with human-rights issues in Australia is either a silly over-reaction or wilful politicking and populism. In any event, it is illogical.

The joint statement said Australia would call for a complete overhaul of the way UN human-rights committees go about their business. It called for the UN to respect the primary role of democratically elected governments and the subordinate role of non-government bodies in reportage of alleged human-rights abuses. Australia would not sign a new Un protocol to eliminate discrimination against women. The statement noted that while other countries were engaged in arbitrary arrests, torture and the Like, Australia’s problems were marginal and minor.

Maybe Australia’s human-rights questions are marginal compared to those of, say, Burma or half a dozen African hell-holes — all the more reason not to be so precious and defensive. Australia should be a leading democratic light, unfearful of having the very highest standards of human rights applied to it. Australia should not engage in the business of comparative human rights, saying we are doing better than Country X or Country Y. Human rights are universal and absolute. We should not be fearful of have absolute standards being applied to us. We should not be fearful of a benchmark not just of world’s best practice, but of an absolute standard being applied to us.
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Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser called this week for a bill of rights, noting that the British common-law system had failed indigenous people in this month’s Federal Court action on the stolen generation. He also called for a political solution, now that the courts had failed. He called for an apology over the stolen generation and reconciliation in the form of an agreement between indigenous people and other Australians. He said governments must act more vigorously and with greater conscience. And if governments will not act, then this is a matter on which people must act to secure a government that will. The dignity and self esteem of Australia at some point will demand it.

It was an extremely powerful statement. It was predicated on the need for this nation to resolve the position of indigenous people in its society, to heal past wrongs so the nation can move forward. That he would suggest voters turn on the present leadership of the political party that he has been a member of and served all his life is a measure of his strength of feeling on the question.

This part of his speech was most telling. Ultimately, it must be up to the political leadership of the country to ensure the healing is done. Whether that is a post-Howard Liberal Government or a Labor Government was left open. Mr Fraser noted that the Labor position on the stolen generation was still lacking.
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SHOULD the ACT get a third seat in the Houseof Representatives? The most recent redistribution has delivered an odd result. The Northern Terri�tory is to have a second seat. Its two seats will have 55,000 and 52,500 electors. The ACT will continue to have two seats of 108,500 and 107,000 electors. The ACT’s seats will each be double the size of the North�ern Territory’s. How could this be fair? Surely, the ACT deserves a third seat. Even then its electorates would have more voters than both the Northern Territory’s electorates.

Representation of the territories has a different constitutional base than representation of the six original states. Each original state must get an equal number of senators; a minimum of five members in the House of Representatives; and subject to the minimum, representation in the House in proportion to its population. Also, the House must be approximately twice the size of the Senate.

Redistributions are based on these requirements. The total population of the states is divided by double the number of state senators, to get a quota. The quota is divided into each state’s population to determine how many members each state gets, rounding remainders of more than a half up and remainders of less than a half down.
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A large amount of public disquiet has greeted the verdicts in the Saudi diplomat murder case. There were two immediately disconcerting elements of the case in the eyes of the public. The first is that a man pleaded guilty to being accessory after the fact of murder and is serving a jail term, reduced after the judge took into account that fact that he would give evidence for the prosecution. The second is that one of the accused attempted to plead guilty to manslaughter during the trial, but the judge refused to accept the plea, describing it as premature. A later element to come out was the nature of evidence excluded by the judge from the jury. That evidence included several witnesses who said they were the recipients of confessions to the killing by one of the accused. In the light of this the average non-lawyer is puzzled, if not outraged.
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