Month: October 2001

Australia’s superannuation industry could have either of two proverbs applied to it. The first is that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. The other is that will be no good closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Yesterday the Minister for Financial Services and Regulation, Joe Hockey, published an issues paper on the industry calling for public comment on what, if anything, should be done about changing the regulatory regime that applies to it. By and large the industry has been running reasonably well. But it would be dangerous to be complacent for several reasons. There have been some failures in the industry, including ones of major trustees, which have resulted in significant losses to funds and members. There have been some spectacular crashes in related prudential industries, notably insurance, which indicate that all is not well with the regulatory environment. No regulatory regime can prevent all failures, crashes and losses, but they can help prevent some. Nor should a regulatory regime aim to prevent all market losses. However, the spectacular nature of the HIH case indicates that perhaps the move to deregulation, self-regulation and market forces has gone far enough.

The argument in favour of some greater regulation of the superannuation industry also arises out the nature of superannuation itself. It is quite different from usual commodity markets. Superannuation has a high social element; the law requires people to put money in a fund; there is little choice about the fund for many people; the fund is tied up for a long time; there are taxation concessions so the Government has a stake; many funds put invitations out to the public; and there is great disparity of knowledge between those doing the investing and those whose funds are invested.
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What has the Federal government got to hide? Reporters, camera crews and photographers have not been allowed to get within a reasonable distance to cover what is happening to refugees being dealt with by Australian troops off the coast of Nauru. There cannot possibly be any security reasons for the lack of access. No-one is doing any shooting. The events are of immense public importance. It seems that six asylum seekers were forcibly removed by 12 soldiers in full battledress from the HMAS Manoora on to Nauru for immigration processing in Nauru. In the absence of access to events by journalists to report to the public, Australians have every right to assume the worst: that the Government has ordered troops to use force to remove the asylum seekers. They certainly should treat any statement from Defence Minister Reith’s office and the defence forces with a great deal of scepticism. Keeping the media away is the first sign that they have something to hide.

It seems that the Government refugee policy — which took a further turn for the worse with the arrival of the Tampa with more than 400 rescued asylum seekers in August — is slowly unravelling. The Government’s new policy is to attempt to prevent these people from landing on Australian soil through the intervention of Navy vessels which then take them to islands in the Pacific for processing under UN rules without access to the Australian courts. With Opposition support, it also removed Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef from the Australian migration zone to prevent refugees landing there from obtaining access to the Australian courts. However, the boats are still slowly tricking through, and instead of having an orderly processing in Australia of the few thousand people a year who escape the hellish Taliban regime, we have a vastly more expensive process of using Australian naval ships to take people to camps on Pacific islands. The camps have cost Australia more than accommodating the refugees in Australia. The cost of the naval ships is unfortunately anyone’s guess. The Government will not provide costings. It only says that Labor’s costing of $20 million a week for the naval picket in the northwest is wrong. The Government should issuing costings on the whole exercise – including the money it has offered the Nauru Government to take the refugees. That money is little short of crude bribe.

Nauru has agreed to the processing of 262 more refugees who were picked by HMAS Tobruk last weekend. But the UN has not agreed to process them there, so the job might have to be done by Australian immigration officials who would have to be taken to Nauru at great cost.
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It is now obvious that there is no difference between the major parties on the question of international security. Whatever one thinks of the policies on refugees and the war in Afghanistan, and this newspaper has expressed grave reservations, both major parties are at one. So the issues that should decide the election are domestic ones. It is on domestic issues that voters should make up their minds.

Yesterday, Labor Leader Kim Beazley officially launched his campaign. Mr Beazley gave significant attention to health, education and jobs. He paid welcome attention to higher education and research. The 200 per cent research tax concession will get industry involved more. The national institute for mathematics and the extra money for CSIRO, although not huge amounts, are a recognition of the importance of pure research and the fact that in a country the size of Australia, government has to do the lion’s share of funding pure research. With significant extra funding, Australia will fall out of the international research-sharing loop as a nation not having a significant enough contribution to make sharing worthwhile.

There has been a growing and diverse group of people warning about the danger of Australia slipping into world irrelevancy.
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The count of yesterday’s paper ballots will be computer assisted.

Gone are the days of ACT Electoral Commission staff counting ballot papers by putting them in piles under each candidate’s name and then distributing preferences also by physically moving ballot papers from pile to pile – a very time consuming process.

(In the first ACT election in 1989 – run by the Federal Australian Electoral Commission – it took several weeks for the count to be finished.)
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Australia still has a good health system on world standards, but we are squandering it fast.

Last week three or four things added to the evidence that we are heading that way.

A judgment brought down by the Federal Court in Western Australia slammed the Australian Medical Association for engaging in anti-competitive conduct. A paper by Julie Smith issued by the Australia Institute put the damning dots and crosses on the I’s and T’s on what we have known to be the inequity of the Government’s health-insurance rebate scheme. An institute paper by Fran White and Kevin Collyer put the cement work on what has worried many about the corporatisation of health care. And long-running disputes by nurses in NSW and ACT have continued without governments recognising the fundamental folly of continuing to exploit (mainly) women in a profession so necessary to society’s well-being.
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A big gripe about the ACT Hare-Clark system is that you do not get a clear result on the night. Indeed, in the part two elections it has taken more than a week to get the result of the last seat confirmed.

This Saturday, it is very likely we will know all 17 MLAs mid-evening on Saturday. This is because of electronic voting. Electronic voting will be available at Melba, Richardson, Gungahlin and Weston, and the four pre-poll voting centres. At the very least 10,000 voters will vote this way. More likely 20,000 and may be double that.

The electronic vote can be counted right down to the last preference in a matter of minutes. Manual voting takes much longer.
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When the Electoral Commission’s computer crunched the preferences of the 11,909 Brindabella votes it had in its system yesterday, it ended Gary Humphries (very slender) chance of government, and cut severely the influence that the Democrats would have in the next Assembly.

It is a sample of 21 per cent of the electorate and is not likely to change.

It gave Labor the third seat in Brindabella and its eighth seat in the Assembly. Together with the Greens Kerrie Tucker (who has vowed not to vote for a Liberal Chief Minister) it is a majority for Jon Stanhope’s Labor Party without needing to deal with the Democrats.
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Next Saturday, voters will be armed with Act Electoral Commission advice that they must mark preferences for at least the number of seats (five or seven) that there are in their electorate. After that you can mark as many or as few as you want.

This week’s Canberra-Times-Datacol polling indicates that it is critical for voters to number right through to the end. It is quite likely that the last two seats will be determined by preferences expressed well down from the first five or seven and that many votes of those who restrict themselves to the minimum number of preferences will exhaust and they will lose the right to have a say in which minor party or independent will get the last seat.

An ACT Hare-Clark election is a very different beast from a Federal House of Representatives election. In the House of Representatives election the way the preferences or the minor parties are distributed to the major parties is critical. And preferences from the major parties to the minor parties do not matter a toss because the two major party candidates are in almost all cases the last two standing in the count and so their preferences never get distributed.
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Counting was much slower than hoped last night.

The electronic vote was not as early as hoped, nor was there enough of it to make solid predictions.

Only the pre-poll electronic vote was posted early. The electronic vote on the day was posted much later.
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The Canberra Times Datacol polls taken over the past two weeks picked the major shift in this election.

Three weeks ago most people would have thought that Independents Dave Rugendyke and Paul Osborne were a shoe in and that the Democrats would shoot themselves in the foot again.

Datacol said that the Democrats were polling solidly and that the two conservative independents were in trouble.
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