Month: May 2002

ACT taverns have a reasonable argument that they should be allowed to have at least some poker machines. Their present allowance of only two class A machines amounts to a total ban because these machines are no longer available. The taverns want to a have a trial of two class-C (modern machines).

At present the 5200 machines allowed in the territory are restricted to clubs. The National Federal of Independent Businesses is threatening to take the matter to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission unless they get access to the machines. That threat would probably come to very little. Nonetheless the taverns have a moral argument, even if they do not have much of a legal one.
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The Federal Government should have been more cautious in its change to immigration policy. It has decided toincrease the intake by 12,000 to above the 100,000 mark for each of the next four years. The emphasis is to be on skilled immigration. Indeed, the program for people applying for permanent residency from within Australia as refugees has been cut from 5600 to 2000 though the humanitarian program overall will continue with the 12,000 places of each of the past five years.

The increase in the skilled program means that Australia’s population will be 27 million in 2050 instead of 25 million. Given the state of thingslike salinity, land-clearing, endagenred species and the like, the wisdom of the increase must be questioned. Moreover, as NSW Premier Bob Carr never tires of pointing out, the major burden of immigration is borne by Sydney, a city whose infrastructure is straining under population growth. Traffic problems, housing shortages and impossible prices and public transport stress suggest that increasing Sydney’s population will result in a poorer, not better standard of living.
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It is common practice for an incoming government to declare the cupboard was bare and that the previous government had hidden the grim truth about the state of government finances so it would not be possible for the new government to deliver all its promises and run a balanced or surplus budget.

The new ACT Labor Government was no different. Upon attaining government it immediately set about redrawing the fiscal landscape. It ordered a commission of audit to look at the books and determine the state of the ACT public account as at October 31.

Surprise, surprise, the commission of audit found the cupboard bare. Indeed, it found at $5 million deficit. This was a completely different picture from that painted by the Liberal Government as it went into the election. It said it was a responsible government that had maintained surpluses.
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The euphoria over the release from house arrest of Burma democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is understandable, but may be premature. The military, which has ruled Burma repressively for four decades, has not suddenly seen the light and decided that truth, justice and democracy are good things and that they should return to their barracks. Rather some of them appear to be driven by fear. The military is clearly split. Some would like to cling to power uncompromisingly. Others. Though, see that the combination of economic sanctions and the HIV epidemic is leading the nation to such an appalling state that it will not be worth ruling or not capable of being ruled as economic breakdown leads perhaps to revolution.

Perhaps they think that by releasing Ms Suu Kyi they will gain some concessions from the international community – particularly western democracies — in the form of a relaxation of economic sanctions. The west should not be so easily fooled. Western countries should wait for a more definite path to democracy and respect for human right to emerge before any sanctions are lifted.
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Labor frontbencher Mark Latham has proposed an ownership revolution with a plan to widen the employee share ownership scheme and a subsidy scheme for first-share buyers. Mr Latham who is assistant treasury spokesman said he wanted to draw on the ideals the compulsory superannuation scheme that was launched in the period of the Hawke-Keating Governments. That scheme had spread the wealth-generation of superannuation from just the well-to-do to the whole community. His leader, Simon Crean, said that many people were now gaining wealth not just through personal exertion and income but through assets. “”We want to spread that asset class to the whole population.

Mr Latham warned that Labor had to modernise or perish. It had to be relevant to a new class of aspirational voters. “”We must meet the legitimate aspirations of working Australians for asset accumulation. It is possible to achieve ownership for all.”
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The bickering between the Territory and the Commonwealth over the sale of a parcel of Commonwealth land in Tuggeranong is not helpful to orderly planning in the ACT. Nor is it helpful to ACT businesses, particularly those in Tuggeranong who had no warning that such a large parcel – 53,500 square metres or the size of 80 suburban housing blocks – would come on the market. The land comes on the market outside the ordinary planning context of the city. Buyers lining up at the auction will have no idea as to what use might ultimately be permitted by the Territory Government.

The Commonwealth is technically and legally correct in asserting the power to sell. The land was national land at the time of self-government, but the Commonwealth has no long-term use for it. The ordinary meaning of the self-government legislation should mean that the land would revert to Territory control, because national land is land that the Commonwealth is using or intends to use. But the legal meaning “”use” also means to sell.
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Edward VII took the throne at the age of 59 on his mother’s death in January 1901. He was on the throne for just nine years before his death at the age of 68 in 1910. That is the fate of the son of a long-living mother. Edward VII’s mother was Queen Victoria who reigned from 1837 to 1901, the longest reign in English history.

The present Queen is celebrating 50 years on the throne. Her son, Charles in now 53. It may well be that he shares the fate of Edward VII. He might, indeed, share the fate of the Black Prince, who in the 14th century died before his long reigning father, Edward III, the only other monarch to rule for more than 50 years – from 1327 (when he was just 17) to 1377.
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The Premier of NSW, Bob Carr, is on a dangerous path in changing the law of negligence by legislation to make it more difficult for people to sue for damages for personal injury caused by medical negligence as he suggested this week. Earlier he suggested that a similar limiting for people suing charities and sporting bodies and government authorities for personal injury as a means of solving the crisis over public-liability insurance.

We have an insurance problem caused by the confluence of several events: higher reinsurance costs stemming from September 11; the collaspe of HIH insurance following imprudent grabbing of market share through lower premiums which flowed through the industry; a faster clearing of old cases by the courts.
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Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visit to Australia was but a brief one. The first for a Japanese Prime Minister for five years. The visit was long enough, though, to highlight the significant differences between the two countries. The differences were expressed with usual diplomatic niceties and they exist in the context of an underlying strength of a relationship built on the base of high-volume trade. But the differences underscore just how pragmatic that relationship is and how little give there is in it.

We export huge amounts of coal and iron ore to Japan because Japan needs and wants them. We import large amounts of Japanese elaborately manufactured items because Australians need and want them.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard told a state lunch than the relationship between Australia and Japan was the “”most broadly based Australia enjoys in the region” and that the economic relationship was “”wide and deep”. It was only so much diplomatic twaddle. The relationship is not especially broad; it is mainly economic rather than cultural. And the economic relationship is high volume — Japan is Australia’s biggest customer for exports and Australia is Japan’s second highest source of imports – but it is narrow.
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The discussion paper on higher education in Australia has resulted in a polarisation of views. On one hand, the Vice-Chancellors (broadly representing university management), students (the consumers) and staff have reacted by calling for more government money to be put into the sector. On the other hand, the Minister for Education, Brendan Nelson, has flatly rejected the idea until the universities come up with plans for change arising out of the review.

It is an unfortunate polarisation. In fact, both reform and more money are needed.

Going back to the 1980s, the Dawkins changes to the university system have been condemned for creating too many universities (perhaps as many as 25 of the 38 institutions) with too many courses not suited to academic discipline. That may be true, but whether they are called universities, colleges or technical schools, they serve a need in educating and training and need funding. Whatever the merit of the institutional changes, the Dawkins changes brought a potential source of that funding with the HECS system. It was a system of fees payable by students when they started earning the larger incomes that tertiary education invariably brought. It should have been the end to the universities’ funding woes. But it has not been because successive governments have put that money into consolidated revenue and barely given the universities credit for it. Instead universities have been continually squeezed and required to raise an increasing percentage of their revenue from other sources, particularly overseas students.
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