Month: November 2004

Political history has many examples of those in power seeking to rid themselves of inconvenient opposition.

Henry II cried in 1170: “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?”

Henry’s knights took the hint and it was goodbye Thomas A Beckett. Henry did not imagine they would murder A Beckett.

Henry VIII hacked off the heads of Thomas More and the occasional inconvenient wife, among others.

In later times the process became less bloody.

Prime Minister Robert Menzies appointed possible leadership aspirants Richard Casey and Percy Spender to diplomatic posts.
Continue reading “2004-11-november Forum for Saturday 27 november 2004 windsor”

Business put its hand up for big tax cuts this week.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s blueprint for reform contains some principles and objectives of taxation policy. They were not much different from those laid out by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations 230 years ago.

Smith said citizens should contribute towards the support of the government in proportion to their ability to pay. Tax ought to be certain, and the time, manner and quantity ought to be clear and plain. Tax ought to be levied at the time and manner in which it is most likely to be convenient for the contributor to pay it.

Most importantly, he wrote, “Every tax ought to be so contrived as both to take out and keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the State.” In other words, no costly tax bureaucracies.

The ACCI principles call for similar things: fairness, efficiency, clarity and simplicity.

The ideals are obvious, but their achievement seems impossible. There are several major difficulties.
Continue reading “2004-11-november Forum for Saturday 20 nov 2004 tax”

This week’s debate over reading should have been over long ago. We should rather be starting to fix the mess.

For the past couple of years I have been teaching part-time in journalism at the University of Canberra.

This is not going to be a whinge about “young people today”. To the contrary, I found all but one or two students among the hundred or so I taught to be enthusiastic, attentive and willing to learn.

But precious few had any idea how to punctuate. They put commas where they should have put a full stop, or even a new paragraph. They reserved colons for descriptions of the digestive tract. When I explained hyphenation of compound adjectives or the use of the perfect tense for reported speech, they thought I was teaching Swahili.

Their spelling was generally good – because they corrected every misspelled word not found in Microsoft Word’s dictionary. They spelt inoculation with one n and accommodation with two m’s and so on.

But they tripped so often over homophones. When I told them so, they thought I was talking about a gay man on a mobile. I was under threat of being dobbed into the discrimination Nazis until I patiently explained. They confused “hear” and “here”, “there” and “their”, “your” and “you’re”, and so on.
Continue reading “2004-11-november Forum for Saturday 13 Nov 2004 reading”

It is more than a quarter of a century since the Australian Law Reform Commission embarked on the quest to reform and unify Australia’s eight state and territory defamation laws.

And here we go again. Last week the eight state and territory attorneys-general agreed to draft legislation put by NSW. They only did so because they had been prodded into action by the Federal Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock.

Ruddock quite rightly points out the absurdity of have eight different laws applying to media that broadcasts over or circulates in several states.

That madness was highlighted in 1973 when Justice Russell Fox of the ACT Supreme delivered his judgment in the defamation action brought by Prime Minister John Gorton against the ABC and journalist Maximillian Walsh.

It was over a fleeting comment on an Australia-wide current affairs program that suggested Gorton had ordered a denial to be issued to a story he knew to be true in order to discredit his Defence Minister, Malcolm Fraser.
Continue reading “2004-11-november defo law reform 8 nov”

Majorities everywhere. The Republicans in the US have the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Liberals in Australia have Kirribilli House (sorry, The Lodge), the House of Representatives and the Senate. And Labor has a majority in the single house of the Act Parliament.

In declaring victory after his majority, George W Bush mentioned the Constitution. But the Australian Constitution did not figure in John Howard’s declaration.

Democrats in America can take some solace that the US Constitution with its Bill of Rights will ameliorate the excesses of the majority. The Australian Constitution is less robust. It does not have the same guarantees of individual rights, nor the checks and balances between the several arms of government. It used to provide at least some restraints against excessive use of power by the Federal Government by enforcing a stricter view of federal powers, but it is now too easy to get around that.

We have seen the flexing of the majority muscle in the past fortnight in Australia. Selling Telstra and exempting small business from unfair dismissal laws are fair enough; they were mentioned in the election campaign and have been Liberal policy for a long time.

But no-one mentioned abortion or the Federal Government taking over the universities and public hospitals in the campaign. Wholesale changes to industrial relations were not flagged. And the fairly restrictive national defamation law hardly got a mention.
Continue reading “2004_11_november Forum for Saturday 6 november majorities”