Month: November 2000

Environmental candidate Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the election, and put George W. Bush (not noted for environmental concern) into the White House.

Nader got 2.5 per cent of the total vote. By late yesterday evening he had 2.27 million of the 85 million counted.

But the election is decided on the total, but Electoral College votes under which each state gets a number of votes equal to its representation in the Congress. The candidate with the most votes in any state takes all the electoral college votes of that state. There is no preferential or proportional counting. The Electoral College has 538 members and a candidate therefore needs 270 to win.

The election came down to the wire. Last night the four knife edge states were Florida (25 votes), Oregon (7) and Wisconsin (11). It meant whoever took Florida won the election.
Continue reading “2000_11_november_nader spils”

Media ownership is on the agenda again. Communications Minister Senator what Richard Alston makes some sensible and of these points are about why a the present laws should be relaxed. Alston will try to put the Democrats and the Labour Party on the spot by presenting proposals to remove the two great pillars of ownership restriction: that no-one can own both a broadcasting licence and a daily newspaper in the one city and that foreign ownership is limited to 15 per cent of a broadcasting licence.

These laws were first created by Labor in the mid-1980s when Paul Keating said media moguls could be queens of screen or princes of print, but not both. The theory was that diversity of opinion required diverse ownership.

Since then, the big media owners have been sniffing around government and opposition leaders desperate for favours in the form of replacing the restrictions. US citizen Rupert Murdoch, who owns the highest circulating daily newspaper in all but two capitals, would nearly like to get into some Australian television action. Kerry Packer, owner of the Nine network, would dearly love to get his hands on the Fairfax newspaper chain.
Continue reading “2000_11_november_media ownership forum”

As the election nears, pollsters, commentators, party apparatchiks, lobbyists, political staffers and everyone else whose livelihood is affected by the outcome look at the tea leaves, interview their keyboards and crunch their numbers to get a feel of where the election is heading.

They wonder where the voters are heading. Where will they move. Will they shift to Labor, or back to the Coalition. Where will the voters preferences move to? The voters are seen like some vast school of silver fish in a David Attenborough-narrated croc doc, shimmering this way and then shimmering that way.

But maybe this view of the psephological world has it the wrong way around.

It is not the voters who ebb and flow. It is not the voters who latch on to some momentum and change their support fickly from one party to the other.
Continue reading “2000_11_november_media for forum”

The inquiry into a the detention of children at a Australia’s immigration detention centres by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission will or not add up a great deal to what most right-thinking Australians already know: that putting children who have not committed any crime or into detention is immoral and should be an acceptable in a Australia.

Nonetheless, the inquiry must be welcome. For a start it indicates that Australia, as a pluralist, liberal democracy, is not run on the basis of whomever wins government gets its way no matter what. The Executive Government of the Commonwealth is just one of many sources of power. There are the states, the judiciary and the Parliament and the statutory bodies created by it and there are media organisations that can re[port the dealings of these other heads of power to change public opinion. In this instance the commission is exercising power granted to it by an Act of Parliament to conduct an inquiry. It is an inquiry that the Federal Government would no doubt prefer did not happen. The Government, though the Minister for Immigration. Philip Ruddock, has agreed to “”co-operate” with the inquiry. In the same breath the Minister belittled the inquiry, suggesting that it would be a vehicle for people who wanted to change the Government’s policy of detention for asylum seekers. Mr Ruddock also pre-empted the inquiry by saying that unaccompanied minors were often sent ahead by “”queue-jumping, illegals” to give the parents a better chance of getting permanent residence. Fair enough, he should have his say, however misguided or inventive it is. However, it is a sharp contrast to the occasions when governments use the fact that an inquiry or court case is afoot to avoid having to making a comment.

The inquiry will air matters that the Government has done its best to conceal. It has created immigration detention centres far away from population centres. It has made it as difficult as it can to prevent media coverage of what goes on in those centres. It has made it as difficult as possible for migrant support groups and other charities to get access to those detained, particularly children. Despite that, complaints have still trickled through to the commission, sufficient for it to set up an inquiry.
Continue reading “2000_11_november_leader30nov detention”

The federal secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Greg Combet, has warned the Labor Party to be careful about watering down its approach to unfair dismissal laws. But it is not only the Labor Party that should be careful about changes to the unfair dismissal laws. The Government needs to take care, too.

The Government has long had on its agenda a plan to make small business exempt from the unfair-dismissal laws. The plan has been opposed by Labor and the Democrats, who have blocked earlier proposals in the Senate. Labor and the Democrats still have the numbers in the Senate, so the fate of any proposals lie in their hands. Both the Labor Leader Simon Crean and the Opposition spokesman on workplace relations, Robert McClelland, have indicated that with the election of the Howard Government for a third term, it now has a greater mandate. Mr Crean has also made it plain that he would like to see a change in the relationship between the union movement and Labor, so that the union movement would have less influence. Maybe he sees his history as a former president of the ACTU as electoral baggage.

The Government might be tempted, therefore, to test Mr Crean’s new stand to the limit by re-submitting its proposal to exempt small business from the unfair dismissal laws. If so, it would be wrong in principle and would perhaps backfire.
Continue reading “2000_11_november_leader28nov unfari dismissal”

The ACT Council of Social Services called on the ACT Government last week to look at the way it collects revenue. Two suggestions its made were to base motor registration fees upon the value of the car, rather than a flat fee and to base rates upon the improved value of the property not the unimproved property. The Chief Minister, Gary Humphries, said he would consider the proposals. He certainly should consider the equities of revenue collection, but he should not trouble himself to greatly on these two proposals. Both of them have deep flaws.

Already there is a danger in Australia that hitting the so-called rich as gone to far. Already on the revenue side there are a range of measures which hit middle income-earners fairly savagely. PAYE taxpayers on $50,000 to $100,000 are singled out for harsh treatment on the basis that they can afford it. The cop extra superannuation taxes, higher Medicare payments, a proportionately high income tax rate after the GST compensation than they had before, higher child-support payments. And on the expenditure side, they get precious little. Family allowances of various kinds fade out. They get no public-transport concessions. They often have to shell out large sums to stay in the workforce on childcare, cleaning, take-away food, dry-cleaning and other services they no longer have the time to do themselves. The danger is that after a time some of these people will get jack of it. Why bother working 50 hours a week and push yourself into the income bracket ripe for government plucking? An income of $50,000 coupled with up to 50 hours of work can become a fairly marginal proposition.

The income brackets $50,000 to $100,000 have copped it fairly heavily in the past decade. It has always been presumed that they can afford an extra slug. After a while, though, the series of imposts builds up. It has a cumulative effect. The state and local levels of government should avoid also singling out this income group. Sure, the ACT Government should help people on lower incomes, but it should be done on the expenditure side where it is transparent.
Continue reading “2000_11_november_leader28nov actcoss folly”

As science gets ever closer to producing a human clone, legislators, ethicists and scientists themselves are grappling with the question of where and how to draw the line. It would be nice to imagine that merely by passing a law, the whole thing will go away. However, the history of its human society shows that if the technology is there, it is likely top be used. We may as well prepare ourselves for the fact of the production of a cloned human being.

When it happens, the created human being will have to be acknowledged either as a human being or just a mass of cells. The choice will be a fairly clear. Once the creature displays the usual attributes of being human there will be no choice. The created being we will inevitably be granted the full rights of all other human beings. After all, whatever its genetic make-up it will have to be born and will be demonstrably human

It would be as well to try to limit and the number of people created this way, but prohibition can only be partially successful. Thirty years ago society was presented with what was then the ghastly prospect of test-tube babies. These babies were created by fertilisation outside the human body – – something hitherto regarded as an anathema from science fiction. But now these so-called test-tube babies have grown to adulthood and some have children of their own. They are loved by their “parents”, their children, other relatives and friends just like anyone else, and receive the same protection of law as anyone else.
Continue reading “2000_11_november_leader27nov embryo”

THE CLOSING down of the 6pm news service at Canberra’s Capital Television and several other regional outlets of the Ten Network in Queensland and the Northern Territory is a betrayal of the public trust given to television broadcasters in return for their access to an exclusive part of broadcasting spectrum, which is public property.

Capital was Canberra’s first and, for a long time, only commercial television channel. It ran a mix of programs from the three main commercial networks, but always had a strong local news programming and very often local current affairs programming. Then came aggregation in 1989. Under that scheme, regional stations were to affiliate with one of the three commercial networks and would be able to increase their coverage to two other adjacent regions which had original stations affiliated with other networks. The aim of aggregation was that regional audiences would get access to the full range of commercial programs enjoyed in the major cities while retaining local news coverage. It was a worthy aim.

The networks gained because they could pipe programs down the line at fairly low cost.

It was always assumed that there would be a news coverage that would satisfy the reasonable expectation of the viewers in the licence area. A news service piped from Sydney does not do that. Crash and bash stories from Sydney and a political coverage that deals with NSW events to the exclusion of ACT events is not good enough.
Continue reading “2000_11_november_leader22nov news cut”

There is a delightful scene in a British movie called the Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer. The movie, released in 1970, starring Peter Cook with a screenplay written by John Cleese among others, should be compulsory viewing in the next week for Prime Minister John Howard, ACT Electoral Commissioner Phillip Green and authorities in Florida where the US presidential election is being decided.

Rimmer is a young Tory whose political motivation is to gain and remain in power. He achieves leadership of his party through machiavellian means and contests an election against a bumbling, pipe-smoking Harold Wilsonesque figure, promising to give the alienated dispossessed a real say. He wins easily.

Upon attaining power he gives every household an interactive television with a red flashing light and siren that activates when a nationwide vote is being sought on issues of national importance. Rimmer bombards the masses until they are sick of the red light and siren. In the final scene, he organises a final vote that would relieve the masses of the obligation to vote on every issue morning, noon and night. Do you agree that President Rimmer can have the sole vote on all issues henceforth so you no longer have to have your lives interrupted by irrelevant matters of national importance? You would never have to vote again. The masses vote overwhelmingly Yes and the movie ends.
Continue reading “2000_11_november_leader18nov voting”