Month: November 2002

Once again Australian television and telephony consumers will be shackled with special arrangements, favouritism and patching up past mistakes.

This week the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission finally came to what it (and other commentators) naively imagine will be a rescue of Australia’s pay television industry.

It agreed to authorise what would otherwise be an illegal anti-competitve arrangement whereby Australia’s two main providers of pay television Foxtel and Optus would be able to share pay TV programming and each would be able to bundle telephony, internet and pay TV services into one package with one bill.
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Defence Minister Robert Hill appears to have adopted the adage that “attack is the best form of defence’’.

The adage often works well in soccer matches, but its application to world affairs carries grave threat.

Hill argues that Article 51 of the United Nations Charter should be changed to take account of different world circumstances as a result of rogue states having weapons of mass destruction and the threat of non-nation-states using them in acts of terror.

One of the key aims of the United Nations was to try to apply one of the four great progressive themes of the 20th century to nation states – namely the rule of law. And Hill’s ideas contradict some basic elements of the rule of law. These include objective rather than subjective tests; rules with universal application; and submission of individuals (or individual nation states) to the collective authority.
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The ousting of Solomon Lew from the board of directors of Coles Myer Ltd reveals some serious defects in Australia’s corporations law.

Lew said after his ouster (or failure to get re-elected), “More than 170,000 households filled in a proxy and voted for me and it gives me some kind of mandate.’’

Not only that, about a quarter of the shareholders by value voted for him.

But despite that, he will not get a place on the board. Lew is right. He does have some kind of a mandate.

The basic trouble is that under the Corporations Act 2001 (and all the law before it) shareholders rule the roost. In most cases a simple majority of shareholders is enough to elect all the directors. In an extreme case, a person controlling 51 per cent of the shares gets to elect every director, with no room for any representation for the people controlling the remaining 49 per cent.
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It does not take much to stir up the repeated cry: “We don’t want self-government we just want a local council.”

But events of the past week might show the truth of Oscar Wilde’s adage: In the world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

The local-council brigade naively imagine that a local council will be more efficient; that rates and charges would fall; and we would live happily under the benign dictatorship of a federal minister.

In Alice Springs this week, at the meeting of the Local Government Association of Australia, it was made fairly plain that local government has inefficiencies and deficiencies which are felt everywhere in Australia except the ACT.

Federal MP David Hawker, who chairs the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics, Finance and Public Administration, painted a fairly grim picture of the funding for local government.
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