Month: March 2002

The Catholic Church is racing against time with stem cell research.

While there is a fair degree of ignorance about it, the church is in with a chance of getting the total ban it wants imposed by the Federal Government. But once more knowledge gets into the community and researchers, either here or elsewhere, get some worthwhile results, its chance of getting a ban will be reduced.

Catholic bishops have called for a nationwide ban on any stem cell research that would destroy human embryos. The House of Representatives Committee on legal and Constitutional Affairs reported on human cloning and stem-cell research in August last year and was divided. The Government is yet to respond, though the Minister responsible, Kevin Andrews, has addressed Cabinet on it.
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If it sounds to good to be true, then it probably is.

In the past two days, the pay television industry has been touting a win-win-win deal.

The two big contenders Optus and Foxtel have done a deal. They say it is good for both of them and good for the consumer and good for Australia.

The Foxtel partners are Telstra, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Kerry Packer’s Publishing and Broadcasting. Optus is owned by SingTel, in turn controlled by the Singapore Government.
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It is fairly sobering that a renewed debate should break out on the Easter weekend about automotive advertising.

The Federal Chamber of Automotive Industry wants to conduct further consumer research into whether there should be restrictions on car advertisements that show excessive speed and aggressive driving.

The chamber and others have argued that there is little harm in the hyperbolic advertisements that show young drivers accelerating violently, speeding and generally putting cars through their paces.
Continue reading “2002_03_march_leader31mar road ads”

Yesterday’s conference on public liability insurance saw a lot of finger pointing and blame shifting. But it also saw a number of suggested solutions to the problem – some of which should be treated with a great deal of caution.

The evidence is clear that premiums for public-liability insurance have increased dramatically in the past year. Small business, charity and community groups and sporting organisations have been hit with increases of sometimes more than 100 per cent.

Less clear is the reason for the increases. Insurance companies say that the number and cost of claims has gone up due to increasing litigiousness and lawyers advertising. They also cite the collapse of HIH insurance and the September 11 attacks of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This blame throwing has to be taken with a grain of salt. There is little evidence of a sudden upsurge in claims to warrant the sort of premium increases that small organisations are citing. The collapse of HIH has been a factor, but not for the reasons cited by the Insurance industry. HIH was pricing unsustainably low, and now the insurance industry wants to catch up on profits lost in the past.
Continue reading “2002_03_march_leader28mar insurance”

Whenever the Liberal Party is out of power – either and federal or state level – its members have a habit of changing parliamentary leaders, usually in ambush coups.

And so it was on Monday that the Opposition Liberal Leader in NSW, Kerry Chikarovski, was ambushed on Monday. She was tapped on the shoulder by a group of younger, less conservative, MPs who told her that her leadership would be challenged by John Brogden, who will turn 33 on Thursday, the day the vote on the challenge takes place.

The extraordinary element of the ambush was its embarrassing timing. The state party’s annual council was held on Sunday. And at that meeting Prime Minister John Howard went out of his was to praise Mrs Chikarovski as the person to become the next Premier of NSW – to the usual hoop-la that accompanies such endorsements. He said that Mrs Chikarovski had the support of all the Federal Liberal MPs and that no election was unwinnable or unloseable, so Mrs Chikarovski could win with a steady release of policy in the year up to the election.
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The Act Government seems to be facing a grim choice: reneging on election promises or job reductions in the public service or going into deficit.

Treasurer Ted Quinlan has asked all public service sections to make a 2 per cent efficiency gain. Any section that cannot would have to explain why. This marginally better than the salami slicing of the 1990s where every public service department took a cut, irrespective of the merits of their spending programs. But it is no substitute for looking harder at some areas of government funding to see if they can be cut out altogether so a greater concentration of effort can be made on the key areas of government activity that concern most Canberrans: health, education and police.

The question confronting Mr Quinlan is, what happens when a large number of public-service sections have “”good grounds” for not achieving a 2 per cent efficiency? Unfortunately, the large areas – education and health – are the easy targets for insisting on the efficiency dividend. And then Labor would be driven to giving with the left hand – an election promise of $27 million of education – and taking away with the right hand – a $7 million cut to education, or promising 20 new police officers before the election and taking away 16 officers through an efficiency drive. This much was pointed out by Deputy Opposition Leader Brendan Smyth.
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The effect of the decision to suspend Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth for a year should not be underestimated. It is too easy to dismiss the Commonwealth as impotent and irrelevant, particularly by people in Australia, Canada and Britain. Those rich, developed countries are members of many other powerful trade and political groupings which make the Commonwealth look less important. But from an African perspective the Commonwealth has greater significance. It is seen as one of the primary vehicles that brought democracy and black majority rule to Zimbabwe and South Africa in the first place. It is seen as an important vehicle for development aid, including aid in things like education, media, politics, medicine, law and so on. The Commonwealth has a greater comparative presence in Africa than the developed countries.

African nations have the United Nations – but they are less significant there. They have the Organisation of African states, but there are no developed nations there (with perhaps the exception of South Africa).
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It did not take long for the accusations that Senator Bill Heffernan made against High Court judge, Justice Michael Kirby, to unravel. Part of Senator’s Heffernan’s “”evidence” that Justice Kirby had used Commonwealth cars to pick up male prostitutes was the Commonwealth car diver’s job card. The job card included the names of others on Commonwealth business on the day in question, including Opposition MP Laurie Brereton and for MP Ian Sinclair. It would not have taken much to check with them whether they travelled on the dates in question. When the Daily Telegraph published the “evidence”, Mr Brereton saw his name on the sheet as having travelled in Sydney. He was in fact holidaying in Hayman Island.

The fact that the “”evidence” was so easily discredited reveals that Senator Heffernan was a best impetuous and lacking judgment, but also very likely that his judgment was clouded by his campaign against paedophilia and perhaps by homophobia.
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The Australian Labor Party is facing yet another period of self-doubt and self-reflection. At a state level, the party has never been more successful. It is in government in all eight Australian states and territories. Yet federally, it third election defeat in succession caused grave misgivings about the party’s direction. Those misgivings were in broadly three areas: the party’s organisation, its policy and the way it is selling itself.

Those misgivings manifested themselves at the weekend with the disclosure of a submission by federal front-bencher Lindsay Tanner to a party review panel that was set up after the last election and by the announcement by three major unions that they were considering disaffiliation with the party. The leaders of two of those unions resigned from the party, one of them joining the Greens.

Mr Tanner’s concerns were directed at party structures, rather than policy or how the policy and party were being presented to voters. His argument was that there was too much branch stacking which enabled too many union officials to party pre-selection. It meant that only those with full-time political ambitions had any reason to join the party. Those that wanted to make a contribution to policy or other organisation input that was not geared to a political career were despondent. Mr Tanner’s points are pertinent. Membership of all political parties, including Labor, is shrinking as a proportion of the population. Membership of a political party is now seen only as a gateway to pre-selection, not as an opportunity to contribute to policy development. Mr Tanner correctly surmises that this was hindering the prospects of the party getting the best candidates and the best policy. Labor has gone some way to addressing the branch-stacking question, though part of that back-fired, so more needs to be done.
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The good news is that the ACT recorded a large decrease in the number of stolen cars in 2000-01, compared to an Australia-wide increase. The bad news is that the ACT came off a high base. The ACT the second-highest number of thefts per 1000 vehicles registered, at 14, only just behind NSW. It may be that that is due to the fact that the ACT is the most urbanised jurisdiction in Australia.

The main reasons for the drop in the ACT is an increase in the use of immobilisers, changes to the bail laws and a greater police attention to car theft.

Still, more can be done on the technology side. Eighty percent of the theft is opportunistic joy-riding. A lot of this can be avoided by the fitting of immobilisers. In Western Australia – where vehicle theft has dropped 41 per cent since March 1998 – immobilisers are compulsory for all new registrations (even of older cars being moved from interstate). The state has a scheme to subsidise the supply and fitting of immobilisers. The ACT should look at a similar scheme. The proportion of older cars and cars not fitted with immobilisers that get stolen is out of proportion to their total numbers. As the car fleet get renewed, thieves are bound to concentrate more on the dwindling number of older cars.
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