Month: October 2004

The cry of where is the money coming has gone up.

Labor says the Liberals have promised $542 million ($800 million on another estimate) over four years, blowing any hope of a Budget surplus. The Liberals say it is much less and they can get a surplus.

The problem for the Liberals is that they have not fully factored in the running costs of their promised new health facilitities. Their Ministers have also gone through the campaign promising things with attaching costs: mounted police (horses and bicycles), per-student private school funding, payroll tax relief, Gungahlin Drive to be dual carriageway and so on.

Under Liberal calculations, though, they can stay in surplus because they come off the 2004-05 result in the pre-election Treasury update, without factoring in all the the projected new programs and projects over the subsequent three years which are laid out in the Budget papers for 2004-05.

The trouble with that is, they have not said which of the already projected programs and projects will get the chop. That would be electorally unpopular.
Continue reading “2004-10-october optional break-out for oped”

Labor got a swing towards it in the ACT in Saturday’s federal election.

If its primary vote last Saturday translates to the election for the ACT Legislative Assembly this Saturday, Stanhope Labor could expect majority government with 10 of 17 seats.

But it ain’t gunna happen, for several reasons.

First, a lot of Canberrans vote for federal Labor for the purely selfish reason that they a federal public servants whose power and pay, they think, is improved by a federal Labor Government. But when it comes to local government get as fretful as the rest of Australia, especially over rates – the local equivalent of interest rates.

Secondly, in the ACT we have multi-member electorates: five members in the Belconnen-based Ginninderrra; five in the Tuggeranong-based seat of Brindabella and seven in the central seat of Molonglo. So we have a name-recognition factor plus a “my-local-member-helped-me” factor. It means quite a few people will have both Labor and Liberal candidates in their first five or seven preferences. In Molonglo in 2001, 8 per cent of the preferences of the first excluded Liberal went to Labor.
Continue reading “2004-10-october oped for wed oct 13 act elections”

Prime Minister John Howard is quite right: Australia has a strong economy.

Australia is a rich country and it is getting richer.

He is also right in saying that only when the economy is strong can you do important things like health care and education.

But there it stops.

Whoever wins, on Sunday morning it would be a good time to reflect on what sort of people and country we are.

In this election campaign we have heard too much self-delusion about the Australian character: compassionate, generous and tolerant.

The campaign is evidence to the contrary. The major parties base their policies on polling. Good representative samples tell the internal party pollsters what voters want and the parties respond.

What a merciless, mean, intolerant lot we are.
Continue reading “2004-10-october Forum for Saturday 9 october”

The kerfuffle over the Sunday Canberra Times putting Chief Minister Jon Stanhope’s head on a doctor’s body was an insignificant sideshow about a small picture.

The main show, with still no clear view of the big picture, is the 2003 bushfires.

As soon the coroner got close to getting a clearer picture, they want to shut her down. This week, nine ACT officials joined by the ACT Government successfully moved in the ACT Supreme Court to stop the inquest into the fires until the court determines whether the coroner Maria Doogan should be excluded on the grounds of perceived bias.

Doogan was moving beyond the hand-wringing and woe over a natural disaster. She was moving beyond the applause for the brave firefighters risking their lives. She was moving beyond the self-congratulatory praise over the response AFTER the event.

She was getting close to the real questions. Yes, it was a natural disaster and not much anyone could do about halting the firestorm that hit on January 18, 2003. But who was in a position to warn the residents on the perimeter of the city that a fire might hit? When were they in that position? And why didn’t they issue the warning before it was too late?

The residents might have had to abandon their homes anyway, but at least they would have had a chance to rescue their sentimental valuables. At least they would have been given a choice to prepare their homes for fire so there was less chance of them being consumed by flames. And maybe they would have had the chance to stay and fight.
Continue reading “2004-10-october Forum for Saturday 30 october 2004 bushfires”

Labor’s mauling of the Liberal Party on Saturday would have had more profound consequences if it had not been for the Hare-Clark voting system.

If there had been a single-member system, like the House of Representatives, Labor would have won every single seat in the ACT Parliament – all 17 of them.

The Hare-Clark system came in for a bit of sneering on election night. It was referred to as the “complicated” Hare-Clark system, the system that no-one understood and so on.

Well, even the most die-hard Labor supporter should be grateful for it.

Without it, there would be no Opposition in the Parliament – unless Labor decided to split into factions, with the Labor Left asking the Labor Right questions at Question Time. Or vice versa given that Labor’s left looks like picking up more seats than the Right (and perhaps the Centre as well).

The booth-by-booth results, as published by the ACT Electoral Commission with more than 90 per cent of the vote counted, show that Labor won 75 of the ACT’s 83 polling places, most of them very comfortably. The vast majority of people vote at the polling booth closest to their residence and so it is a fair assumption that votes in a single-member system would follow the booth-by-booth vote.

In Ginninderra, Labor won every booth except the tiny booth of Hall.
Continue reading “2004-10-october Forum for Saturday 23 october 2004 electoral”

Suddenly, Federal politics is no longer about health and education, but communications and industrial relations.

So now is the time for the Democrats to keep the bastards honest. Yes; the poor benighted Democrats who have just three years left to make themselves useful.

Australia is facing a Coalition majority in the Senate in July next year, when the senators elected on Saturday take their place. Worse, the Coalition could be one short of a majority and will have to rely on the Family First senator who could extract all sorts of unmandated concessions as a price of implementing Coalition policy.

We could see the Privatisation of Telstra and Prohibition of Stem Cell Research Act 2005 or the Small Business Can Sack Anyone and Sunday Shop Closure Act 2005 or the Packer and Murdoch Can Own the Lot and Medicare Will Not Fund Abortions Act 2005 and so on.

The Coalition and the Democrats have a comfortable majority in the present Senate with 42 senators. The Democrats’ role in life has been to ensure that governments stick to their mandate and to tone down some of the excesses. It has not been to block mindlessly.
Continue reading “2004-10-october Forum for Saturday 16 October 2004 democrats”

As a journalist I have been watching two seemingly unrelated but alarming trends.

The first is that cars have been getting far more reliable these past 20 years. A 10-or 15-year-old car now is far more reliable than its counterpart a decade or so ago.

The second is a growing realisation that the young women who go into prostitution are most likely to be the victims of drug abuse, nasty pimps and immigration spivs.

So why is this so alarming?

Because journalists are now in danger of slipping below used car salesmen and prostitutes in the order of professions on the list of trustworthiness and respectability. That will put us very near the bottom.

Mercifully, nothing will drag us below real-estate agents, who will always describe as “a stone’s throw to the shops” a distance that Robert de Castella would find hard to cover in a hour, or who will describe a house crying for the bulldozer as a “handyman’s dream” or where “rustic” means Telstra will charge $6000 to put the phone on.

None the less, journalists will remain below professions like taxi drivers and bus drivers, even though I understand there is a now new mathematical theorem which suggests that the longest possible distance between any two given points is the ACTION bus route.

We are even below politicians.

Teachers are in the middle.
Continue reading “2004-10-october english as a second language”

The people of the ACT have given Chief Minister Jon Stanhope majority government.

Its cautious government over the past three years has resulted in voters not being concerned about handing Labor a majority.

A lot of last night’s victory is a personal victory for Stanhope. It is reflected in his high personal vote of 2.1 quotas.

The electorate has obviously thought that a majority Labor Government is a better proposition than a minority one relying on Green support. The prediction of Greens’ federal leader Bob Brown of three or four Green seats fell to dust.

So why did Stanhope do so well and the Greens and Democrats so badly?

Stanhope has brought a passion and conviction to the job. While his federal colleagues and Labor leaders in the states have concentrated almost solely on the economy, Stanhope went beyond that. He was not frightened to legislate and fund a strong agenda on human rights, indigenous people, gay rights, the environment to the like. With that agenda voters obviously thought the Democrats and Greens less necessary.
Continue reading “2004-10-october act election result”