Month: August 2001

The Federal Government has had plenty of warning on the issue which is now causing such strife in the automotive industry.

About 300 workers of the TriStar steering and suspension company went on strike over the failure of the company to entertain negotiations over protecting employee entitlements during enterprise bargaining negotiations. The company supplies components to major manufacturers who have now stood down, or are about to stand down, 12,000 workers. It seems that that TriStar was the first company to be hit by a campaign by the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union to set up a fund to protect employee entitlements.

The campaign arose after the failure last year of National Textiles, a company in which the Prime Minister’s brother, Stan Howard, was a key manager. About 300 employees stood to lose about $11 million in holiday, long service and other entitlements. However, the federal government bailed them out on a special-case basis. Since then, many other companies have failed, leaving employees in the lurch. Perhaps the largest was the case of OneTel in which 1400 employees were owed at total of $25 million.
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THE ACT needs to be careful. Tacit assumptions that we have the best educated, most caring society and are best able to deal with social questions of any jurisdiction in Australia are under threat.

The ACT still has a very low imprisonment rate compared to other states or territories, but if present trends continue that will not last much longer. Recent statistics put out by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Institute of Criminology reveal that the ACT is increasing its rate of jailing faster than all other jurisdictions and has among the worst jail rates for youth.

And, contrary to popular mythology, crime at rates are falling, not rising.
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This week the Victorian Supreme Court brought out the red flags. It was the same red flag that legal authorities required to be waved by a walking person in front of the devilish new contraption called the automobile.

This week it was the Internet.

Justice Hedigan was hearing a case brought by the Melbourne businessman and flamboyant owner of the Melbourne Football Club, Joseph Gutnick. Gutnick was suing for defamation over an article published in the Wall Street Journal. In normal circumstances, he would have no action in Victoria because the Wall Street Journal is not published there. However, the Wall Street Journal and its investment advisory magazine, Barrons, is published on the internet — some free and some by subscription.
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There, before 600 or 700 people in at the Great Hall of Parliament House and the nation itself was the unstated corollary.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, was addressing a National Press Club lunch which had been moved up the hill to Parliament house because of a double booking at the club itself. Howard was extolling the virtues of his first two terms and explaining why a he should get a third.

He concentrated, as he has done in nearly three decades of public life, on economic matters. In particular, he talked about taxation. However, to the extent that his speech contained an element of social concern it was for and about the ageing population.
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Prime Minister John Howard says he is listening. However, when it comes to the drug problem it seems that he is only listening to what he wants it to here. If there is a squawking pressure group which is threatening to cost the Coalition some votes then Mr Howard is happy to throw some money at them to shore up his electoral support. However, if there is a really difficult policy decision which requires courage and leadership he turns a deaf ear.

Last week the head of the National Crime Authority, Gary Crooke, said governments should consider treating heroin addiction as a medical problem and should consider supplying heroin from a government-controlled repository to registered addicts. Mr Crooke cited damning statistics about heroin in Australia under prohibitionist policies. In the mid-1980s there were an estimated 34,000 heroin addicts consuming about three tonnes a year of heroin. Now, an estimated 74,000 people were addicted to the drug and they were using about at 6.7 tonnes of heroin a year. Authorities had seized just 734 kilograms of heroin in the past year, less than 12 per cent of the amount being used. The number of heroin users was up from an estimated 0.4 per cent of the adult population in 1995 to 0.7 per cent in 1998 and overdose deaths had gone from 302 in 1989 to 958 in 1999.

Mr Crooke came to the obvious conclusion that present policies are not working.
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