Month: March 2005

At least there are some issues where Australia and the Howard Government do not slavishly follow the United States.

In the US this past week, yet another heavily armed civilian went on a random-shooting spree killing many innocent bystanders – depriving them of their right to life.

The US Congress has done virtually nothing in the past two decades to prevent these killings. It passed some minor restrictions on guns after President Ronald Reagan was shot an injured in 1981.

Yet this same week Congress was specially recalled in a weekend sitting and passed special legislation which was signed immediately into law by President George W Bush. The legislation was aimed at forcibly keeping alive Terri Schiavo, who lies in a vegetative state in a hospital in Florida.

The Bush Administration and other religious extremists in the US show bizarre contradictions about the right to life. They spend all their efforts on the unborn and nearly dead, while other policies are an affront to the lives of the healthy living.

More than 1500 US servicemen and thousands of others have been killed in Iraq – a war prosecuted prematurely and without UN sanction. If the preservation of life were your belief, surely you would exhaust all other options before committing to war.

More than one person a week is executed in the US – nearly half in George Bush’s state of Texas. Some are innocent. The vast majority are guilty of terrible crimes, but if the preservation of life is your belief, why not find some other punishment?

More than 30,000 people a year die by firearms in the US. About 12,000 are homicides; 1000 accidents; and 17,000 suicides.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 26 march 2005 artifical feeding”

My first trip to Canberra was the result of an arithmetic error, of sorts.

It was in 1964 or 1965.

I recall the incident now after the blunder in last week’s column when I wrote that the naming of Canberra took place 82, rather than 92 years ago. Indeed, I sat bolt upright in the middle of the night – early Friday morning to be precise — realising the blunder. I dashed to the computer and penned an email to the editor of the Forum pages stating that arithmetic was not my strong suit and attached an amended version.

But silly me. I had corrected the Word file but failed to save the changes before attaching it to the email. The 82 years was duly published.

Normally, one would expect a cascade of nyahdy nyahdy nyahnadies. But the object or my tirade on this occasion was Bob McMullan, long-time Federal representative of the ACT in the Senate and the House – a man more keen on dealing with the merits of the argument than some trivial arithmetic error.

I would never have come to Canberra but for a similar error.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 19 march”

Eighty-three years ago today (March 12), Lady Denman, wife of the Governor-General of Australia, officially named Canberra and unveiled the foundation stone in what is now the parliamentary triangle.

From the very start, bureaucrats and politicians attempted to stultify vision with concerns of commerce and cost.

In 1911 an international design competition for the new national capital was won by Walter Burley Griffin. It was inspired by the American cities beautiful movement – a highly idealistic group which sought, through human ingenuity of design, to create better places for humans to live. It sought practical, efficient, beautiful and satisfactory places to live, as opposed to the uncontrolled chaotic urban sprawl resulting from industrialisation.

Finish and French entries came second and third. King O’Malley, the Member of Parliament placed in charge of the competition, referred all three placegetter’s designs to a departmental board which came up with a hotch-potch combination of the entries.

A change in government fortunately saved us from this spoilt-brooth approach to town planning.

In the intervening 83 years the tension between the intelligent ideal and idiotic immediacy has never ceased. Indeed, it has become more vociferous since self-government in 1989.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 12 march 2005 nca”

It was inevitable that the GST would end in tears before long, because the system was flawed in the first place.

This week, Treasurer Peter Costello called for greater accountability on how the states spend the GST revenue, and the states in turn told him to butt out.

The flaw in the GST system is that the Commonwealth was forced into a grave error at the time it was introduced. In order to get the GST legislation through the Senate, the Commonwealth agreed that all the revenue would go directly to the states to replace untied Commonwealth grants.

It was a foolish thing to do. It was one of the biggest shifts of power from the Commonwealth to the states in the history of our federation. No longer would the state premiers have to go cap in hand to the Commonwealth every year to argue for money.

Before 2001 the Premiers argued with the Commonwealth each year about how much in total would go to them. The Commonwealth Grants Commission would then apply a formula as to how the total would be divided among the states.

These days the total is guaranteed. Within three years of the GST’s introduction, the money going to the states outstripped the old grants (even allowing for inflation). GST revenues go up automatically with economic growth, or better. In its first year (2000-01) the GST was about 3.7 per cent of GDP. In 2003-04 it was be just over 4 per cent of GDP and in that time GDP has grown from $671 billion to $780 billion.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 5 march gst”