Month: January 2002

The events over the past few days at both the Curtin and Woomera detention centres reveal several quite sickening aspects of the policy which should – but, alas, do not – cause such widespread protest that the Government would be forced to change direction. The first is the fact that so many children are in detention. Children are vulnerable, as events of the past few have shown. At the Curtin centre in Western Australia police are investigating allegations that three Sri Lankan men sexually assaulted a five year old boy and attempted to sexually assault another five-year-old boy. One of the boys has been in detention since last March with his mother, two brothers and a sister.

That a five-year-old boy, who has committed no crime, can be put into detention in Australia for nearly a year should be offensive to the vast majority of Australians. Alas, apparently it is not. The Government feels it can continue with this abhorrent policy because it is popular. It may be popular but it is not right.

The vulnerability of children in these centres is now more apparent.
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A survey revealed this week that 64 per cent of people would like a return to the annual inspection of vehicles over a certain age. Even allowing for the smallness of the sample, it indicates a fair degree of support for the return to annual inspections. Before the last ACT election, the Labor Party indicated that it would look at the question. This week it said it would study the survey before commenting.

There is a danger here that the Government will take up the popular cause. It would be wrong to do so. It is easy for someone responding to a survey to contend quite honestly that a return to vehicle inspections would be a good thing because it would improve road safety. A great majority might hold that view. The trouble is that a quick survey of attitudes does not present the true complexity of a problem, and probably never can because people at the end of a phone line will not be bothered with a survey that presented a large amount of data for a considered opinion.

This is where political leadership plays a role. It is now up to government to explain why the reintroduction of car inspections would not be a good idea.
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Parents and guardians of disabled people in the ACT must be frustrated to breaking point over disability services in this affluent territory. The deaths of three people in government-run share homes for the disabled in 2000 were obvious grounds for saying something was wrong with disability services in the ACT.

Each death was referred to the coroner.

But such was the disquiet, that towards the end of 2000 pressure mounted in the Legislative Assembly for a separate, specialist inquiry. At the time the Government argued that an inquiry was not warranted, would be too costly and would step across the coronial inquests already in train. The Assembly (with the Opposition and the cross-bench joining forces) passed two motions ordering an inquiry and threatened legislation. The Government was bound to act, but it decided not to appoint visiting law professor Roger West who had 25 years’ experience in disability services. It was a churlish. Instead it appointed former Supreme Court Justice John Gallop, arguing that his background would avoid the legal pitfalls of cross with the coroner.
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The decision to put Viagra on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme list has been welcomed by some and condemned by others. Pfizer, the makers of Viagra – the wonder drug to treat erectile dysfunction – had already applied twice to have the drug list and failed. Third time lucky. This time, though, the company sought its listing for only a certain range of conditions, including diabetes and those with spinal-cord injuries.

A listing can make a huge difference in the number of people who take up the drug, and therefore the profits of the company with the patent on the drug. The scheme has had huge benefits for patients needing drugs at a reasonable cost. Under the scheme a person pays $22.40 for a prescription – $3.60 for pensioners, and the rest is paid for by the government. The other great benefit of the scheme is that the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee can negotiate with the drug company over the price that the drug will be supplied to the scheme. It has meant that the scheme in effect buys for all Australian consumers using economies of scale and purchasing power to lower price. Classical economic theoreticians would be horrified. Too bad. Classical economics is for widgets, not drugs that save lives or affect the quality of life.
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Yet again the Government’s policy on health insurance is revealed to be a costly, ideologically driven fiasco.

Research by Dr James Butler of the ANU’s National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health reveals of the three major policy changes to stem the drift from private health cover, the cheapest policy was the one that worked best and other two have been expensive failures.

The percentage of people with private cover has slowly fallen since the introduction of Medicare. It was 50 per in June 1984 and had slid to just 30 per cent in June 1998. It only benefits were a capacity to queue-jump, but at a cost of having to fund the gap which public patients did not have to fund. It was not value for money so people left, particularly the young.
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The difference of view by the Smith Family and the Centre for Independent Studies over how many people in Australia are living in poverty may sound like a sterile, arcane, academic dispute that cuts the fine lines of statistical analysis. But at the basis of the debate are some important questions about the extent and definition of poverty and what should be done about it.

The Smith Family says 13 per cent of people live on or below the poverty line – 14.9 per cent of children and 12.3 per cent of adults. This is up from a decade ago.
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Pauline Hanson has retired again. This time, however, any comeback to a position of power or influence in the One Nation Party looks remote. Moreover, though she has retained party membership and reserved the right to seek One Nation pre-selection for a seat in Parliament, it is unlikely she will get it. She had a run in the last federal election and failed to get a Queensland Senate seat largely due to the fact that One Nation failed to secure any preference deals of significance. And at the previous election she failed to get re-elected to the House of Representatives after her seat of Oxley was cut in two during the redistribution.

As things stand, the powerbase of One Nation has shifted from Queensland to Western Australia, where there are three One Nation Legislative Council members.

Further Ms Hanson has other things on her plate. She says she has seven legal cases to contend with. She faces a committal hearing in April on fraud charges arising from the registration of the One Nation party in Queensland.
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The Federal executive of the ALP has blocked an attempt by backbencher Duncan Kerr to move from Federal to state politics. Mr Kerr was elected to the fairly safe Labor seat of Denison at the federal election in November. It was such a short time ago. He stood to represent the people of Denison in the Federal Parliament for three years. Nothing has changed in his personal circumstances that makes him less capable of representing them. He has not suddenly got ill or had some family crisis.

Rather Mr Kerr has decided that he does not like the idea of serving in Opposition. He wants to be part of a Government team. He saw that there was a Tasmanian state election coming up sometime this year, probably in November, but perhaps earlier. The Tasmania state Labor Government is likely to be re-elected.

The Hobart-based federal seat of Denison which he now holds has exactly the same boundaries as the Tasmanian state of Denison because the Tasmanian state parliament uses the federal boundaries of the five Tasmanian seats combined with the multi-member Hare-Clark system which provides for six members in each of the five electorates to make a lower house of 30. Mr Kerr would be appealing to exactly the same people he appealed to federally in 2001 to elect him to the state Parliament. He would hope to be elected and become a Minister in the new state Government.
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The Federal Government is preparing new legislation on media ownership to be introduced in the first session this year. The legislation will change the existing laws which limit each individual foreign investor to a 15 per cent holding in a free-to-air television network, 20 per cent in pay TV and 25 per cent in major newspapers. They also limit a proprietor from owning both a newspaper and television station in one market.

The great difficulty with media law changes in Australia is that governments of both sides of politics fear upsetting the major protagonists. Past experience shows that any government brave enough to propose changes that would affect the interests of major proprietors get savaged. It means that reform that puts the public interest first has escaped Australian Parliaments. Occasionally a compromise goes through, when the major proprietors see it as not offending their interests. In the period of the Hawke Government the present laws were framed so that, in the words of Paul Keating, one could either be a prince of print or a queen of the screen, but not both. At the time Kerry Packer was concentrating on television and Rupert Murdoch on print, so it suited them.

Times have changed. Mr Packer has since intensified his ambition to control the Fairfax newspapers and Mr Murdoch has his eye on setting up a fourth commercial television network.
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The United States is behaving in a reprehensible way in its treatment of people it has captured in Afghanistan. It has shipped them – sedated and hooded – half way around the world to its military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (The US holds the base under a 1903 lease in perpetuity and kept hold of it after Fidel Castro and the communists came to power.)

US authorities have got themselves into a legal and moral twist over the question. The question must be asked: one what basis are these people being held? Are they suspects in a crime committed in the United States? Are they prisoners of war? Or are they something else?

It appears the US would like the last option: something else. Some have called them “”battlefield detainees”. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called them “”unlawful combatants”. It seems these words are aimed at defining the detainees out of the classification prisoner of war or crime suspect. This is because if they are prisoners of war the US has responsibilities under the 1949 Geneva Conventions. These include access by the Red Cross, respect for religious practice and some minimal conditions under which they are kept. Apparently, these are not being complied with. Moreover, if they are prisoners of war they should be released at the end of hostilities. Those hostilities are likely to end fairly soon, because the US does not want a protracted military presence in Afghanistan. But the US “”war on terrorism” will go much longer and the US will want to keep these people for the duration.
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