2003_11_november_stay forum excision

In October 2001 Prime Minister John Howard said at the launch of his re-election campaign, “We decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”

He instilled fear in the hearts and minds of part of the Australian electorate and won the election.

That statement, though, invites two questions. Who are “we” and what is “this country”? The meaning of both has changed since 2001.

“This country” used to mean Australia with all of its islands. But in our brave new Alice in Wonderland world the word “Australia” means just what John Howard chooses it to mean — neither more or less. And in this instance slightly less than we all thought.

For the purposes of the Migration Act, suddenly islands are being excised from Australia. It is a legalistic way for Australia to worm out of its international agreements on refugees.

Under those agreements Australia has a duty to treat refugees who arrive in Australia in a certain way — not to return them to countries where they might be persecuted and to accord them basic living requirements (even if in detention) and a right to protection while their homelands are in turmoil. The Migration Act gives them a right to apply for a visa and the High Court can supervise the way that law is administered.
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2003_11_november_forum for saturday taxes

The money has to come from somewhere — to fund health, education, police and roads.

This was Chief Minister Jon’s Stanhope’s riposte to Opposition Leader Brendan Smyth’s tirade about stamp duty going up by 67 per cent under the Stanhope Government.

Stanhope is right about the need to tax, but when he said the ACT had a narrow tax base hence the high stamp duty rates, he was slightly off the mark. True, the ACT has a narrower base than other states and territories because there is less industry here and one of our main industries – federal administration – enjoys an almost tax-free status. But the states and territories no longer can whinge that they have a narrow tax base now that the GST is in force. The $35 billion GST revenues go entirely to the states, under GST law. It is a very broad-based tax. It is imposed at 10 per cent on roughly half of Australia’s wealth generation. (It raises $35 billion which is 10 per cent of half of Australia’s total $700 billion GDP.)

The original GST plan was for greater income tax cuts and the abolition of various state duties, including stamp duty. But the Democrats watered it down. Once food was exempt, the income tax cuts were diluted and the states and territories kept many of their duties.
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2003_11_november_forum for saturday kerrie tucker

Something about the ACT Senate seats attracts hopeful, high-profile independent and minor-party candidates like bogongs to the light on the hill.

This week the hitherto electorally successful ACT Greens MLA Kerrie Tucker announced she would not be standing for a fourth term in the ACT Legislative Assembly and would consider standing for the Senate.

She would be wasting her time.

The two Senate seats in each of the mainland territories have been stitched up by the major parties. The system is deliberately arranged so that each major party gets one Senate seat each in the ACT and the Northern Territory and no-one has ever comes remotely within range of changing that outcome.

Former Prime Minister John Gorton, Tasmanian Democrat Senator Norm Saunders and Democrat former Farmers Federation chief Rick Farley are among the victims of the lure of the ACT Senate seat. None got within cooee.
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2003_11_november_forum for saturday judicial activism

The judiciary in Australia has come under heavy attack on several occasions in the past two decades or so for what is called judicial activism, or judicial adventurism.

This week the High Court’s second-longest serving justice, Michael Kirby, explained the need for restrained judicial activism in a series of lectures he was invited to give in England.

The attacks of judicial activism in Australia came in several sweeps. First, state premiers were incensed that the High Court allowed the Commonwealth’s foreign-affairs power to strike down state laws and interfere in what they saw a state matters.

Then Ministers in the Keating Government were incensed at the High Court. The court struck down Labor’s attempted prohibition of political broadcasting on the ground that it was offended an implied right of freedom of political communication in the Constitution. Then it struck out a Labor Member’s defamation action on the ground that the Constitution protected political communication. Some called for the appointment of black-letter lawyers to the Bench to prevent this judicial activism.
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