Month: December 2001

Somewhere in the council “”office” on Murray Island is a typewritten piece of paper which may have some historic value.

I was reminded of it this week by the inclusion of the Mabo papers in the Memory of the World register set up by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

Murray Island (the locals prefer the name Mer) is in the Torres Strait. It was here that the Mabo case started. Eddie Mabo resisted moves by the Queensland Government to takeover the island irrespective of generations of dwelling by the native people.

His case came to the High Court, initially in the early 1980s, coming to final judgment in 1992 in the now famous Mabo case which recognised native title in Australia.

When the case first came to the High Court, I was reporting the court, and with typical journalistic prescience pooh-poohed the case: it was obvious from earlier cases that native title was nonsense.

In 1992 I – like many of my colleagues – wrote much about the case from the comfort of a newspaper office.
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Prime Minister John Howard wants more workplace relations reform in his third term. He has long wanted to wind back union power. But despite being elected three times he still cannot get his way totally.

Labor has begrudgingly acknowledged that given the three Coalition wins it would be open to compromise on workplace relations, particularly the application of unfair-dismissal laws to small business. But it is unlikely to force secret ballots before strike action can be taken.

The impasse illustrates some of the defects in Australia’s constitutional set-up. On one hand, it seems a bit ridiculous and undemocratic that a Government returned three times cannot get its legislation through. On the other hand, do we want untrammelled power handed to whomever wins government every three years or so.

The essential trouble is that the Senate has too much power. It is more than a house of review, it is also the house of the perpetual block.

All legislation must go through the Senate. The only way around it is the heavy-handed and risky weapon of the double dissolution followed by a joint sitting of both houses.
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South Australian state MP Nick Xenophon has proposed legislation that would require MPs who resign before a general election to pay for the resulting by-election unless the District Court declared the early retirement was justified on compassionate or other reasonable grounds. The proposal has some superficial appeal.

Mr Xenophon was elected on an anti-poker-machine platform as a “”No Pokies” MP, so his proposal is in the form of a Private Members’ Bill. The major parties have not stated their attitude to the proposal, but they are both likely to be against the proposal – – self-interest being strong enough to overcome the enmity between them that usually prevents an identical stand on any given issue.

Nonetheless, Mr Xenophon’s proposal gives rise to some interesting issues. It would cause some consternation among MPs if instituted in the Federal sphere. Soon after this year’s election, for example, Federal Labor frontbencher, Duncan Kerr, announced that he would leave federal politics and enter state politics. Mr Kerr, who was Minister for Justice in the Keating Government, said he had gone into public life to make decisions, implement policy and shape events. He therefore thought it better to be in the Tasmania Parliament where Labor governs than languishing on the Opposition benches federally. He has a point.
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The Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, has ordered a suspension of assessment of asylum seekers from Afghanistan and has ruled out granting visas to about 1600 asylum seekers from East Timor, some of whom arrived up to eight years ago.

Mr Ruddock’s decision has caused consternation among refugees support groups, civil libertarians, migration lawyers and others. It is almost as if the man can do nothing right and that whatever he does must be condemned outright.

This newspaper has been a stern critic of the Government’s mandatory-detention policy and the policy of attempting to divert asylum seekers who arrive in small boats to Pacific islands for processing, rather than bringing them to Australia. Mandatory detention is unnecessary and expensive. Detention in remote camps – particularly of children – for indefinite periods is inhumane. Diverting people to poor Pacific nations is corrupting and unnecessarily expensive.

That Mr Ruddock and the Government are misguided on these questions, however, does not mean they are misguided on every decision they make with respect to asylum seekers. The decisions made this week with respect to Afghan and Timorese asylum seekers make good sense – at least up to a point.
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Over the past few decades the spiritual side of Christmas has had a harder task getting heard over the commercial side. It was not so much the secularization of the festival of itself that caused widespread dismay, provided the festival retained its emphasis on families getting together and peace and goodwill, though many Christians would have preferred the religious element of the festival to retain prominence No, the dismay has been caused by the secularisation of Christmas leading to the festival being more about buying, giving and receiving presents and about indulging in food and drink to excess.

And now a new phenomenon has further degraded the original Christmas spirit. Not only are people succumbing to the commercial pressures to buy and over-indulge, they are now doing it more and more on credit. So not only do they wake up after Christmas with a hang-over, but also with large credit-card bills that they cannot hope to pay off in minimum time, resulting in large fees for the banks. The burden is falling disproportionately on those who can least afford it.

The average outstanding balance will go over the $2000 mark, that is up 16 per cent on the same time last year. The growth in credit-card transactions has been alarming. After the Christmas binge total credit card debt will hit $20 billion. It has doubled over the past three years. It would not matter if the transactions could be put down to people preferring the safety and convenience of electronic transactions to cash one, but the evidence it pointing to people being sucked in to running up greater bills than they can pay for – particularly if unexpected expenditure arises the following month.
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The injunction granted by the ACT Supreme Court against Chief Minister Jon Stanhope over the Gallop inquiry into disability services in the ACT seems to have been cast far too widely. Justice Ken Crispin granted the injunction on the application of four senior ACT bureaucrats who feel their reputations might be adversely affected by the publication of the report.

Mr Gallop, QC, himself a former Supreme Court judge held an extensive inquiry over several months following the death of three disabled people. One of the reasons for the inquiry, instituted by the previous Government, was the rising public disquiet over the deaths. There has also been or continuing several coronial inquests.

Mr Gallop’s inquiry and the coronial inquests do not define rights – they are not empowered to fine or jail people or award damages. Their task is to come to conclusions fairly quickly about the circumstances of the deaths and whether there are systemic deficiencies that need to be addressed quickly. There is a great public interest in these inquiries. The public has a right to know if disability services are running properly or if there are any circumstances surrounding the deaths that warrant prosecution or police inquiry. That public interest is defeated if reporting by the inquirer is frustrated by the courts.
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The case of Daniel Heiss presents a great difficulty for not only ACT authorities but the prison system Australia-wide. Heiss was sentenced to life imprisonment 10 years ago in the Northern Territory. He was found guilty of a particularly gruesome murder in the Northern Territory and is serving his sentence in Alice Springs. The bulk of his family, however, live in the ACT.

If rehabilitation is to have any place in the criminal justice system, it would be better if criminals were jailed at a place reasonably close to their families. Even in the case of the most heinous offences, the system should not give up on criminals but aim for their rehabilitation one day. The question is – how is that day determined.

The Northern Territory has a minimum term of 20 years for those sentenced to life imprisonment. It is not a minimum mandatory sentence – it is a period sent from those who have already been sentenced. In an ideal world, it would be better if each case could be reviewed regularly, rather than have blanket minimums. It may be that one person can reform more quickly than others and be returned to society to perform a useful role more quickly than others. However, the elected parliament of the Northern Territory has set its minimum for people sentenced to life – for the worst sort of crimes. Heiss’s crime fits that category.
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The ACT has been caught in the crisis over medical negligence insurance.

The crisis began in NSW when the chair of neurosurgery at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Professor Michael Besser threatened to resign his public-hospital position because of very steep increases in medical indemnity insurance. He faced an increase of $100,00 a year. At that rate, he said, it was not worth his while to continue public-hospital practice. Other neurosurgeons and obstetricians joined the threat, undermining the whole system of visiting medical officers at public hospitals.

The NSW Government has come to the rescue by offering indemnity coverage for all doctors treating public patients in public hospitals for past, present and future claims. It now seems that the ACT will have to flow suit or face a mass exodus of visiting medical officers from the public hospital system.

The huge increases in insurance have come about after concern in the whole insurance industry about whether premium income is enough to sustain claims. This concern has flowed from the collapse of HIH and the September 11 bombings, but also because of the increase in both the number of claims and the average size of payouts in medical negligence cases, particularly arising from childbirth and brain injury.
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The photograph on the front page of The Canberra Times told a story of enormous poignancy. There were two girls – perhaps aged five or six — hand in hand. They could have been at a school holiday camp, except the camp they were in was not a holiday camp; it was a prison.

The two children were photographed within the grounds of the Woomera detention centre for people who come to Australia without visas – usually by boats across the ocean.

The children were photographed behind a high wire fence in front of a detention centre building which had been extensively damaged by fire and rioting. The damage ran to about $1.5 million and was caused by the inmates. The criminal damage is inexcusable, but it is understandable.

But what is also inexcusable but beyond understanding is the Australian Government’s policy on asylum seekers. Even if the Government felt it necessary for national security to lock up every person who arrived on our shores without a valid visa, do we have to lock them up in the middle of the desert? What have we got to hide? Even if we have to lock them up, must we add to their misery the misery of an inhospitable desert climate?
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Armed air marshals could be aboard domestic flights this week. The first 22 graduates of a training program which began four weeks ago are ready to take to the air. The Federal Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, has confirmed the readiness of the marshals. The marshals come from the Australian Protective Service. This has given rise to objections from the Police Federation. The federation’s chief executive, Mark Burgess, said the positions should be filled by properly trained police.

The spat between Australian Protective Services and the police is of little moment compared to the broader question of whether we need a service at all. After all, the record of police services in Australia in subduing people who might pose a threat to security is rather mixed. The propensity to shoot, and inadvertently kill or unnecessarily injure seems too high. Transposing that record to an aircraft in the sky invites alarm.

But the whole idea of putting air marshals aboard domestic flights is deeply flawed. It seems as if it has come about because authorities and airlines felt that they had to do something after the September 11 attacks. It would have been better for them to stand there rather than just doing something.
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