Month: December 2000

There is the very good news, and the not so good news. Last week, ACT schools were rated as the best in the world. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment rated reading, mathematics and science skills of 265,000 15-year-olds across 32 nations in the developed world.

Australia was up with the best and the ACT was the best jurisdiction in Australia. Overall, it meant that the ACT was doing best.

In national comparisons, only Finland had significantly better reading literacy than Australia; only Japan had significantly better mathematical literacy and only Japan and Korea had significantly better scientific literacy. The ACT on its own outranked Finland in reading, Japan in mathematical literacy and both Japan and Korea in scientific literacy – putting it on top of the world.
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Planning Minister Simon Corbell has appropriately fulfilled an election promise to restrict dual-occupancy developments in Canberra to 5 per cent, or one block per 20 in any residential section. The restrictions will last until neighbourhood plans are in place. The first ones of these will be in place in the middle of next year.

These is a clear mandate for limiting dual occupancies. That was the overriding intent of the policy that Labor took to the election and Labor got a substantially higher vote than the Liberals who had no such proposals.

The real test for Labor and Mr Corbell, however, is to come – in the creation of the neighbourhood plans and the development that follows them. A delicate balance has to be struck between preserving streetscape and residential amenity and the need for urban renewal and housing choice.
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The Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, is likening the situation that Israel finds itself in with that in the United States – an innocent victim of terrorist attacks. In Israel’s case, it is the President of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat, rather than Afghanistan’s Taliban, who is harbouring the terrorists, under the Sharon view of the world. It gives him the right to attack Mr Arafat and Palestinian strongholds in the West Bank and Gaza, just as the United States has attacked Afghanistan.

The argument may wash with the Jewish lobby in the United States, but not with many others outside the US. Surely, not even President George Bush would fall for this one, though there have been signs of it with his failure to urge restraint on Israel’s part.

The analogy simply breaks down. Even on the strongest anti-US view, the attack on New York and Washington were at the worst a response to US policy positions, not a response to some direct US military action. The appalling Palestinian suicide bomb attacks in Israel were a response to equally appalling Israel extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinians; killings of demonstrators, including children; frequent invasion and closing down of Palestinian towns and cities and the frequent destruction of Palestinian property.
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The Australian Labor Party is continuing to debate questions of how it should define itself and how it should portray itself to the voting public. Most recently, frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon, the spokesman on resources, called for a scrapping of the rule forcing ALP members to belong to a union.

Mr Fitzgibbon says the rule encouraged branch stacking and alienated middle Australia. He is right on both counts. He argues that if only members of a union can join the party, political aspirants facing a rank and file pre-selection process are forced to stack branches with trade unionists and pensioners (who are exempt from the union-membership rule). He called for wider reform than just the reform of the 60-40 rule under which union delegations get 60 per cent of the seats at party conferences.

The whole relationship between the party and the union movement is now open for debate. And about time, too. Union membership has declined to less than 25 per cent of the workforce, and less than 20 per cent of the private-sector workforce. It seems many people think union membership is irrelevant to their lives. And with Labor’s primary vote the lowest it has been in 70 years, more people are seeing the Labor party as irrelevant to their lives. The nature of the Australian economy and society have changed and the Labor Party has not moved with it. The party retained its influence beyond its support base from 1983 to 1996 because the preferential, single-member system of voting in the House of Representatives delivered it seat numbers far greater than its support. The position in the Senate reveals labor’s true support base – just 37 per cent of the seats.
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The Corowa People’s Conference which met at the weekend has recommended a long process towards another referendum on whether Australia should become a republic.

The process will necessarily be long and fairly complicated. In any event, no action will come from the Federal Government while John Howard is Prime Minister.

While opinion polls suggest that a majority of Australians would like to see the severing of the remaining constitutional ties with Britain, the stumbling point arrives when the question “what sort of republic” is asked. Some people are committed to having a direct election that they will campaign and against any other republican model. Other people are wary of a direction election for a new position in the Australian constitutional framework. Whichever model is proposed enough of one or other of these two groups of people will side with monarchists to form a majority in favour of no change – even though a majority would like a republic.
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The move by NSW, Victoria and Western Australia to set up an inquiry into federal-state financial relations should be dismissed for the political stunt that it is. The Treasurers of the three states met last week to announce their review. The three are net contributors to the equalisation process – called horizontal fiscal balance. Queensland and the ACT are about neutral, though just on the receiving side and the Northern Territory, South Australia and Tasmania receive the lion’s share of equalisation payments.

So this inquiry is a whinge about these three states having to shoulder their fair share of the responsibility of being part of the Australian federation.

The benefits of federation have been shared among all Australians for more than a century. They include the benefits of free trade, the efficiencies of more uniformity than if the six colonies had become separate nations, the benefits of being able to deal with the world as a larger block and the intangible benefits such a the pride of nationhood. These benefits outstrip the detriment suffered by the better off states in being called upon to make equalisation payments.
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Maybe the get-tough plan with illegal immigrants is working. It is obviously coming at some human and political cost, but the figures reveal that illegal immigration by boat is down this year against last year. Last year 3720 people arrived illegally in Australia by small boat. This year 2500 have arrived. Whether this is can be put down to government policy having a deterrent or whether it would have happened anyway is anyone’s guess. Worse, it might be put down to the weather – in the past month 160 people drowned when two boats went missing. Other unknown boats might also have been lost.

The Government has come in for some fearsome criticism over its refugee policy in the past 18 months. The detention of illegal immigrants has a fair amount of support. However, the length of time of detention; the conditions of detention -both remoteness and harshness – and the fact that so many children and women are detained has caused great concern. About 270 children are in detention. Sometimes detention lasts for years. Heart-breaking.

It is probably true to say that a country like Australia should be able to absorb a couple of thousand boat people a year without resorting to detention. After all, we take about 100,000 immigrants a year. But we need to ask what might have happened without detention. A soft-touch Australia could have been targetted by more people-smugglers. And we would not be asked to absorb 3000, but 10,000. Change the response to the problem and you change the nature of the problem.
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The High Court’s recent decision to prevent the Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, from deporting Mansour Aala back to Iran, is more than just an immigration case. It is a major statement of Australia law which will have widespread, long-term effects. Not quite a Mabo, or Tasmanian Dams case, but a constitutional milestone nonetheless. The case creates some strong constitutional rights for individuals in the form of a shield against the ever encroaching power of the legislature and executive.

The significance is that the legal shield is a strong one and its use is not reserved for immigrants and refugees, but all Australians. It gives them an enforceable right to be treated fairly by Commonwealth officers.

Perhaps it has not got the attention it deserves because there is a lot of difficult lawyers’ talk in it.
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Prime Minister John Howard is not locked into retiring during a third term, contrary to most political commentary. In an interview published today (Page C6), Mr Howard was asked about how many more elections he would contest.
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The clubs are screaming. So are the Labor Party, the hotels and the casino. It’s over a new poker-machine law that was passed in the Legislative Assembly this week.

The clubs deserved to be clipped around the ears, but the legislation will pose an unfair (perhaps fatal) burden on small clubs and imposes an unjustifiable burden on political donations, as we shall see.

First to some history. In the 1970s when the ACT did not have pokies, people flocked to the Queanbeyan Leagues Club. Too much money was going across the border so the ACT allowed pokies here. But they were restricted to clubs and later to just six hotels. The casino was not to have them.
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