Month: February 2002

The chair of the ACT Legislative Assembly Standing Committee on Legal Affairs, Bill Stefaniak, called last week for public submissions on the size of the Assembly. His call comes at a time when the South Australian Parliament is under irresistible pressure to cut its numbers. That was one of the conditions put before both major parties by the Independent who won the balance of power at the last election.

But it also comes as the number of voters each MLA has to look after is increasing. According to a fact sheet issued by the committee, at self-government in 1989 there were about 10,000 voters per MLA. Now there are 12,934. We have also had our Federal representation cut recently from three members of the House of Representatives to two.

The fact sheet cited the ratio in Tasmania at 1:8221 (and falling) and in the Northern Territory at 1:4420. If local councils in those two jurisdictions are considered the ACT’s ratio is much worse.
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The question of a light rail between Gungahlin and Civic is back on the agenda.

MBA Group project manager Ken Ineson urged the ACT Government to move quickly on the light-rail link before benefits were lost. He argued that international experience showed that light rail attracted commercial development along the route because developers liked its permanency. This meant that land values would rise. Mr Ineson thought that the Government would be able to recoup the $80-$100 million to build the link within five years by reaping the rewards of increased land value. He thought the opportunity need to be taken soon before land next to the route was sold off.

The Government should treat the proposal with a great deal of caution. Transport schemes should rely on their own commercial viability rather than on increased land values. Too often developers pick up the windfalls from increased land values, rather than the community through the Government.
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The evidence is slowly coming in that the Federal Government – taken collectively – lied before and after the election about asylum seekers in order to gain political advantage and win the election and to justify its actions after the event.

It lied in telling the Australian people that people seeking refugee in Australia had thrown their children overboard in order to blackmail Australia into rescuing them.

It lied in telling the Australian people that asylum seekers in detention had sewn their children’s lips together in order to blackmail the Australian Government into taking them out of detention.

It exaggerated the possibility that some of the boat-people seeking asylum were terrorists and security risks – to the extent that the Australian people were deceived.
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The Federal government has launched yet another attempt to change the unfair dismissal laws. Once again it is going about it the wrong way. It wishes to exempt small businesses – those employing under 20 people — from the provisions. The change offends normal principles of equality before the law. Why should one employee get a different set of rights from another, just because their employer happens to employ a higher number of other employees? The principle should be that employees should be treated fairly, irrespective of the nature of their employer.

The Government has called its latest attempt to change unfair dismissal laws the Workplace Relations Amendment (Fair Dismissal) Bill. This Orwellian renaming fools no-one. Its real intent is the Small Business (Capricious Sacking Now Allowed) Bill. It is fundamentally unfair to discriminate against one class of employees.

The Government makes the point that the new law would make it more likely that small businesses would employee more people. Maybe so, but under that theory all sorts of employee and public protections could be removed in order to create employment. In any event, the Government’s claims about the new laws creating 53,000 jobs are untested. There may be some, but it would be difficult to quantify.
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From march 26, smokers in the Tasmania’s Public Service will be required to clock in and out when they leave the office for a smoke. Under an agreement worked out with the union workers will be required to make up for every minute spent outside smoking. The idea has been picked up by anti-smoking campaigners, who applaud it.

But the idea is based on a fallacy that there is a precise amount of time-off that smokers get which non-smokers do not. No human is capable of working undistracted by non-work things for exactly eight hours a day. All employees day-dream, play cards on the computer, send personal e-mails, make personal calls on the phone and so on. Provided this time is within reason, employers would be silly to prohibit those activities. It would drive employees to become counter-productive zombies.
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AN unseemly brawl has broken out in the Coalition over the Speakership and Deputy Speakership of the House of Representatives.

The normal pattern for the Coalition when in Government has been for the Liberals to vote for contenders among Liberals for the Speakership and for the Liberals to take that position. The Nationals then vote among themselves for the deputy Speakership and take that position. When the full House meets the Colation puts up only one candidate for each position (the Liberal and National who won the ballots in their party rooms) and they get the positions because the Coalition together has more votes on the floor of the House than Labor.
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Yesterday’s golden jubilee of the Queen of Australia passed virtually unnoticed by most Australians. It is sad in a way. The Queen has been the very model of a modern constitutional monarch. She has been dutiful, indeed generous, in devoting her time and energies to Australia on a ceremonial level given her huge range of other duties as Queen of a couple of dozen Commonwealth countries and her major role as constitutional monarch of Britain – a role requiring virtually full-time attention not only at a ceremonial level but also in keeping herself informed of poetical developments and even offering occasional private advice to the British Prime Minister.

The Queen has maintained great dignity in the face of the antics of an appalling family whose misdeeds are legendary enough not to need mentioning.
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President George Bush called on Americans to face up to “”new realities” in proposing a huge increase in defence spending. The new realities are presumably the world after September 11. Those realities mean that the US must spend more on defence if it is to pursue its stated aim of hunting down those responsible for the New York and Washington attacks and bring to book those regimes that harbour them.

But the other compelling reality – that the increased defence spending must be paid for by somebody – has been ignored by President Bush. Far from facing up to that reality, he postponed it.
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THE new chair of the ACT Legislative Assembly’s Planning and Environment Committee, Vicki Dunne, says she would like her committee to put more emphasis on the environmental big picture and less on neighbourhood disputes over who builds what where.

She does not want the committee to be a de-facto appeals tribunal on planning matters, arguing that there are enough hoops to jump through in the current process without this committee becoming another one. She does not want the committee to be the arbiters of good taste. Questions of setbacks, heights and colours should be left to the development application process.

It seems Mrs Dunne is taking an unnecessarily stand-off approach. In doing so she underrates the role of the committee of which she is chair. The committee – in its former guise as the committee for Urban Services — has already had a period of reluctance to engage actively in the planning process and debate in the city.
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The Aboriginal community has been done a grave disservice by the taking of the coat of arms from the outside wall of Old Parliament House and the absurd High Court writs seeking injunctions against the Commonwealth for using emblems of the kangaroo and emu on the grounds that they are sacred or significant to the Aboriginal people. Further writs were being considered against various sporting and business bodies that use the symbols.

The writ in the name of the Aboriginal Embassy sought for all High Court judges to disqualify themselves and for an international tribunal to hear the matter.

The patent absurdity of the writ and the action of taking the coat of arms away have infuriated many Australians. Fortunately other Aboriginal groups have dissociated themselves from the action. Ngunawal elder Ruth Bell said the tent embassy members were not representative of her people. She was rightly concerned that the actions of the tent embassy members would reflect badly on the Ngunawal people. Other responsible Aboriginal leaders should do the same thing. But if they do, the question arises in the precisely what the Aboriginal tent embassy does represent. If it and the actions of people claiming to be representative of the embassy are disowned by Aboriginal groups across Australia, its validity comes under question. If the actions are not disowned, it means that the embassy, as a representative of the Aboriginal community engages in some very silly actions.
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