Month: February 2005

In 1969 the American radical writer Hunter S Thompson ran for the office of Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado.

Thompson was not a law-and-order man. Quite the opposite. He stood in protest after a crackdown by Aspen police and courts against hippie longhairs loitering on the footpath in the chic skiing and former mining town.

He was defending a choice of lifestyle. This week Thompson, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, took the ultimate lifestyle choice, putting a bullet through the roof of his mouth.

Thompson lost the election to the “round-‘em-up” incumbent, but the contest of ideas and values continues in Aspen and beyond. It is between liberals who want to conserve the town and the environment while allowing people to be free and easy, on one hand, and conservatives who want to restrict individuals being free and easy but wanting individuals to build whatever they want wherever they want it in the name of progress.

I have just returned from Aspen – addicted as I am to the white powder which is far too expensive for my income; ski lift tickets were an astonishing $95 a day.

The skifields, in fact, are part of this clash, or should I say race, between sensible economic activity which does not destroy the very base which provides the wealth, on one hand, and rabid short-term exploitation without regard to tomorrow, on the other.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 28 February 2005 aspen”

The cliché “leaves many questions unanswered” certainly applies to last week’s (week ending Feb 12) decision restoring $3.75 million to a man who was made a quadriplegic when he hit a sandbar when diving into the surf at Bondi beach.

The cliché is apt because the original decision was made by a jury. It was overturned by the NSW Court of Appeal and restored last week by the High Court.

A jury’s decision, of necessity, leaves many questions unanswered because juries do not give reasons for decisions.

You have to wonder why we persist with juries. Evidence that they approach their task with diligence, intelligence and reason is at best anecdotal. Most jurisdictions prevent disclosure of what goes on the jury-room, so we will never know.

Who knows, this jury might have thought, “Poor Guy Swain in a wheelchair and his poor parents having to look after him. Why not make the insurance company pay?”

Then again, the jury might have thought, “What negligence to put up flags near a sandbar. People are encouraged to swim between the flags, so they have a right to expect the sea there not to contain hazards that could have been spotted by those who placed the flags.”

Different jurors would probably have different reasons for their decision. Some might have consented to a majority view so they could get home early.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 20 February 2005 juries”

Prime Minister John Howard could well be secretly hoping Labor wins this month’s election in Western Australia.

While ever all the state and territory governments are Labor ones, Howard will get support for his centralist policies – most recently expressed in industrial relations and education.

It is a far cry from the Fraser years. Remember New Federalism under which the new Coalition Government would wind back the dangerous centralist socialist policies of the Whitlam Government. Since at least 1972 the Liberal Party has stood for states rights against the onslaught of centralism which it equated with socialism and meddling state control. It riled against Labor’s use of constitutional inventiveness like the expansion of the foreign-affairs power to enable the central government to get its way in fields such as the environment, discrimination law and unfair dismissal.

Now the Liberals have been in power in Canberra for nearly a decade, their tune has changed. Their earlier objection to centralism in principle has fallen away. They want to override the states and territories.

The Liberal Party itself is very much a creature of federalism. Its state bodies are independent. Its national organisation does not have anywhere near the policy-formulating powers of Labor’s national convention. Nor does it have the Labor Party’s system of “national intervention” when the state branches go awry.

Liberal Prime Ministers Robert Menzies and Malcolm Fraser were federalists. Howard, on the other hand, seems much more a centralist.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 12 feb 2005 federalism”

The US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was quite right to point out after the Iraqi election this week that democracy is not just a western value, but a universal one – one sought by people in the Arab world as well.

President George W Bush made a similar point in an address marking the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy. He said, “There are, however, essential principles common to every successful society, in every culture. Successful societies limit the power of the state and the power of the military — so that governments respond to the will of the people, and not the will of an elite. Successful societies protect freedom with the consistent and impartial rule of law, instead of selecting applying the law to punish political opponents.”

They are fine words. But Bush himself has not lived up to them. So it was a fine thing this week to see a US court ordering him to live up to them. A Federal Appeals Court in Washington DC ruled in favour of half a dozen detainees held by the US military at Guantanamo Bay.

Judge Joyce Green zeroed in on the need to limit the power of the state and the power of the military. She said the “President is not authorized to rule by fiat that an entire group of fighters has [few] legal rights”
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 3 Feb 2005 bill of rights”