Month: December 2003

On my reckoning, about half a tonne of booze was unnecessarily loaded on to JAL flight 403 from Tokyo to London just before Christmas.

The flight was chockers – 350 passengers and crew. Each had a litre or more of booze on average, weighing with glass and paper wrapping perhaps one and a third kilos. Most of it was produced in the British Isles – scotch and gin, the duty-free staples. So it was going back there, unopened. Much of it was bought earlier in Sydney because the Tokyo-London flight was the second leg of a now-popular Sydney-London route. So the booze has gone half way round the world and back again.

Why should this anachronism continue?

The duty free regime originally allowed people on ships to take on shore bottles bought on board. Often duty had been paid elsewhere. Often the bottles were opened and the contents half-drunk. So originally it was a reasonable convenience for travellers. The schemes expanded to include goods bought overseas, so that individual passengers were not hit with duty on single items such as electronic goods when the duty was designed to hit large importers as an industry-protection measure.

These days, protection duties are on the way out. Duties, particularly the GST and tobacco and alcohol excises – are designed to raise revenue or to discourage certain conduct. There is no rationale to let one class of people – travellers – avoid them, while others – stay-at-homes – have to pay them.
Continue reading “2003_12_december_satyy forum duty free”

Kim Dalton, the head of the Australian Film Commission, was interviewed on ABC 666 Radio last week.

Fowler, Gowers and Don Watson would have wept. It was a masterful performance of bureaucratic language. I’ll come to it below.

The commission is to merge with Screensound, the neologism for what we used to know by the more sensible name, the Australian Film and Sound Archive.

Any organisation that changes its names from the Australian Film and Sound Archive (a name which tells anyone precisely what the organisation is) to Screensound (a fatuous meaningless concoction) deserves punishment.

The punishment should have been for its managers to hang their heads in shame for a week for bowing to faddism, and they should have been ordered to change the name back to the sensible original. The punishment should not have been the organisation’s dismemberment.

But my argument here is not so much about the fate of the Australian Film and Sound Archive as about the language which accompanied the attempted hatchet job.

Why don’t they say what they mean? Why don’t they simply say: We propose to chop away part of the archive in Canberra? We propose to move the management of the collecting of archival material to Sydney and Melbourne. We propose that most of the dealings between the archive and the public will be moved to Sydney and Melbourne. Some people now working in Canberra will have to move or lose their jobs. We think that the action is in Sydney and Melbourne, so there.
Continue reading “2003_12_december_saty forum language”

This week saw yet another erosion of “states’ rights” — yet another lock of hair being removed by the federal Delilah from the Sampson states’ hair. But it is unlikely to result in the collapse of the whole temple.

This week the National Competition Council told the states that they have had enough time to get their houses in order. More precisely, the council reported to the federal Treasurer the detail of the states’ failings in competition policy and recommended the withholding of money from them according to the level of failing.

NSW Premier Bob Carr immediately branded the Treasurer’s acceptance of the recommendations as “fines”. He squealed loudly that NSW was being “fined” $50 million for not falling into line with federal wishes on liquor trading. He painted a picture of drunken ruffians being able to get liquor where and when they like under a federally dictated scheme. But because he could not afford to lose the $50 million that the NSW was “entitled” to, he would be forced to legislate to allow booze to be sold anywhere, anytime. The Feds would be responsible for the increased crime and violence.

It was high-level grandstanding.

There are no fines. There are no entitlements.

Competition policy does not work like that.
Continue reading “2003_12_december_forum for saturday competition”

Don’t expect to see the so-called generational change at federal level trickle down locally.

All major-party sitting MLAs are standing again. Some deferentially say that they are standing for pre-selection again, but in this environment it is the same thing. (Incidentally, is it only in English-speaking countries that one stands for a seat?)

Anyway Labor’s Bill Wood, aged 68, and Ted Quinlan and Wayne Berry, both 61, and the Liberals’ Greg Cornwell 65 will all stand again, though Cornwell’s official position is that it is unnecessary to decide until nominations for pre-selection close. Come the end of the next term the four will be 73, 66, 66 and 71 respectively.

But in the ACT context I’m not sure age is as important as attitude and drive. Maybe this is a harbinger. In an aging population we will soon have a quarter of the population over 65, so we should expect to have a quarter of or MLAs over 65. Generational change for its own sake is not as important as change directed at making the plant thrive. And in the plant that is the ACT polity we might have some old dead wood, but we have also got a fair bit of young dead wood, too. We should not worry about the ages of MLAs but what they are (not) doing.
Continue reading “2003_12_december_forum for saturday act after the poll”