Month: June 2003

John Howard made a few accurate and pertinent statements about the Senate at the weekend conference of the Liberal Party.

His points were:

The Senate has too much power.

It is no longer a states house.

It is no longer a house of review but house of obstruction.

Neither major party, for practical purposes, can get a majority in their own right in Senate.

It would be unfair and undemocratic for the Coalition to do a deal with the Labor Party to alter the Senate voting system to make it harder for minor parties to win seats.

The present constitutional provision of a double dissolution to resolve deadlocks between the Houses is relatively unworkable and rarely used.

Double dissolutions usually result in a worse result for the Government because they result in more minor-party senators in the Senate because the quota is lower when 12 rather than six senators are elected from each state.

That the non-government majority in the Senate has a permanent veto on the aspirations mandated at earlier elections of the serving government.

Referendums to change the Constitution are notoriously difficult but we need a “moderate and non-threatening” change to resolve the deadlocks, so you do not have to have a premature and expensive double dissolution to get important Bills through.
Continue reading “2003_06_june_howard on senate impasse”

The ACT Government’s good intentions on gazumping should be tempered with a bit of market reality.

Gazumping is where a seller agrees verbally to sell a home for a certain price, but before contracts can be exchanged to create legal obligations, the seller sells to someone else for a higher price. As a result, the first buyer is out of pocket for searches and building inspections.

The practice is regarded as unethical, but it is not illegal. The new law will not make it a crime, but hopes to reduce the opportunity for gazumping by forcing sellers to have a contract ready at the time the property is advertised. It will have to include: a copy of a search; approval status of the original building and any improvements or new structures; a building inspection for defects; and a pest report.

With that material a contract should be able to be signed almost immediately.

Buyers will get a five-day cooling off period, but will have to pay 0.25 per cent of the purchase price if they opt out. Buyers can waive the cooling off period if they get legal advice.

Buyers can get costs if they rely on the information and it proves false.
Continue reading “2003_06_june_gazumping for op-ed”

Simon Corbell has a lot of skittles in the air at the moment.

Corbell is the Minister for the Where and How We Live (Planning) and the Minister for Whether We Live (Health).

That in itself is an argument for a bigger assembly and more ministries. Even people in foreign aid these days recognise that extra money spent on administration is better than sending the wrong trucks with the wrong sort of food to places where people are well-fed.

But health and the size of the ministry aside, a huge amount is going on in planning which will directly affect the way people in Canberra live.

A week ago we had the workshop on Canberra’s Spatial Plan – fancy words for where the next batch of development will go. This is the macro stuff.

A few days ago the most radical change to the Territory Plan came into force – Variation 200. This sets the rules on the size, shape and placing of dwellings you can build.

A month ago a new requirement for building approval came into force called High Quality Sustainable Development.

And in the past year, the Government has been slowly getting back into the land development business.
Continue reading “2003_06_june_forum21 planning”

Two mightily fallen capitalists – Rene Rivkin and John Elliott – face disgrace and financial ruin.

Yet capitalism itself booms, particularly in Australia. Unemployment, inflation and interest rate figures look good. The share market might be a bit bleak and the property market a bit over-heated, but there is no hyper-inflation of the 1920s nor recession of the 1930s. Nor do we have the evils of the exploited, starving workforce of the 19th century. In short, capitalism is looking pretty good even if we have a few failed capitalists.

Karl Marx got it wrong, or at least only partly right. He thought there were inherent contradictions in capitalism and that ultimately it would collapse in on itself to be replaced by a workers’ paradise where each worked according to his or her ability and took according to need. But too many humans are too selfish too often for that. The lesson from Elliott and Rivkin is not that capitalism overall is self-destroying, but that some individual capitalists are self-destroying, and that when they fail the system does not fail, but rather repairs itself or those within it repair it.

In a way, both Rivkin and Elliott have been caught by the perpetual repair activity that capitalism undergoes to ensure the system’s survival.

Between them they committed the two deadly sins of early 21st century capitalism – allowing a company to trade while insolvent (Elliott) and insider trading (Rivkin).
Continue reading “2003_06_june_forum for saturday jun 13 capital”

Do we need a Governor or Administrator in the ACT? Monarchist Professor David Flint thinks so. He argues that governors-general, governors and administrators (Viceroys) are not mere rubber stamps, but provide an important constitutional function.

He thinks the Governor-General could double up as the ACT’s Administrator and do less ceremonial work around Australia so he or she could attend to important ACT constitutional duties.

Flint’s argument has got some difficulties.

To turn the monarchists’ slogan around, the ACT system is fixed, there is no need to break it.

If the role of Governor contains important constitutional duties, that must mean an exercise of power of one sort or another. In a democracy, those who exercise power should either be elected or should be accountable to those who are elected according to stated parameters.

The trouble with monarchy is that the monarch asserts power through what the monarch asserts to be divine right. True, in modern constitutional monarchies, the monarch (or the monarch’s representative in the form of a Governor-General) agrees not to assert day-to-day power but to give it to elected representatives. Nonetheless, some reserve “divine-right” power remains. It is uncodified. Convention determines when it arises, but there is nothing to say how it is to be exercised or provide redress if it is mishandled.
Continue reading “2003_06_june_forum for saturday governor for act”

Medical practitioners have a tougher time under the law than other defendants. But Governments should not cave in to all their demands just because they behave like blue-singletted yobs on the waterfront threatening to withdraw their labour unless they get it all their own way – as they are in the ACT at the moment.

The heat has been turned up in the ACT, because Jon Stanhope is the only state or territory leader to consider victims’ rights more carefully in medical negligence as well as road and workplace injury. All other jurisdictions have put in place legislation that severely cuts vicitms’ compensation rights. They have been led by that most knee-jerk of Premiers, Bob Carr in the NSW.

Stanhope’s proposals are more balanced. He is not going to put an arbitrary cap on damages. Good. He is not going to take away children’s rights. Good.

However, doctors do have two reasonable gripes about their liability which need attention: the long limitation time and the test for medical negligence.

The doctors argue that it is unfair that their liability can hover for more than 24 years after a medical event.

AMA president Dr Bill Glasson says doctors could be sitting in their rocking chairs with a catheter years down the track wondering if they might be sued.
Continue reading “2003_06_june_forum for saturday 26 jun medical negligence.do”