Month: August 2005

Thousands of Australian war veterans have two journalists and a public servant to thank that their entitlements were not slashed by the Federal Government last year by $500 million.

The public servant – obviously disgusted at the meanness of the Government — leaked the proposal to Michael Harvey and Gerard McManus of the Herald Sun who promptly published.

The Government – without the help of spin and misleading advertising campaigns – was caught. It had to abandon the scheme. But it did not abandon the witchhunt against the leaker and the journalists which moved one pace ahead this week in a way that could develop into a major test of freedom of speech in Australia.

The Government sent in the cops to find the source of the leak. The valuable resources of the Australian Federal Police, which would be better spent chasing terrorists or even speeding motorists in Canberra, were unleashed to chase a public servant who embarrassed the Government. There were no questions of national security or threat to life or limb – just a threat to the ego of the Howard Government and its pervasive media management.

The police trawled the records of several thousand emails and phone calls and they charged Desmond Patrick Kelly under the Federal Crimes Act with leaking official information.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 27 august 2005 journo privilege”

Surprise, surprise. Australians have not taken up digital television. It was inevitable from the late 1990s when the Government set up its digital-television policy. The policy was a dud from the beginning, and I and others pointed out its obvious defects. The policy pandered to the big end of town – the three commercial networks at the expense of the viewing public.

Where are we more than four years after the beginning of digital transmission? A mere 500,000 out of 7.8 million households have digital television – a little over 6 per cent. In Britain the figure is 70 per cent.

Communications Minister Helen Coonan acknowledged the low take up this week and said something should be done. The House of Representatives Committee of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts might well be miffed that Coonan’s statement came as it is conducting hearings into the question. Coonan said that the analog system could not be turned off in 2008 as the original policy envisaged. She said also that no one had made a case for a fourth commercial network.

Those statements might well have pre-empted what the committee might find. For a start, turning off the analog system sooner rather than later might get more people to go digital – but voter outrage would prevent it. But adding a purely digital fourth network might encourage digital uptake because viewers would at last get some value out of digital.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 20 august digital television”

Beware politicians meddling with electoral matters. Invariably they change the rules to suit their own side.

Chief Minister Jon Stanhope wants to do exactly that in his attempt to increase the size of the Legislative Assembly.

He makes some solid arguments about why the size should be increased, but on the configuration of the electorates and seats his arguments happen to suit the Labor Party.

At present we have two electorates of five members and one of seven, making 17. Stanhope wants five five-member electorates, making 25.

On the voting patterns of the last election, this would very much favour Labor. In the two five-member electorates, Labor averaged 48 per cent of the vote and got 60 per cent of the seats. In the seven-member electorate it got 45.5 per cent of vote and 42 per cent of the seats.

It would be appalling for the Greens. In the five-member electorates they got 7.5 per cent of the votes and zero seats.

(Incidentally, I am rounding to the nearest half a percent for ease of reading).

The Liberals and the Greens want three seven-member electorates – for equally self-serving reasons. In the seven-member electorate the Greens got 11.5 per cent of the vote and 14 per cent of the seats. The Libs got just 32.5 per cent of the vote and 42 per cent of the seats – a richly undeserved result.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 13 aug 2005 size of ass”

In 1942 Australia was fighting the Japanese for its very existence as a nation. In that war, all the values and institutions that Australians hold dear were under threat.

The terrorist attacks on London transport, in Bali nightclubs, the New York World Trade Centre and the Pentagon were horrific, but they were not nation-threatening.

In that year Robert Menzies, later Prime Minister, gave a series of broadcast essays called the Forgotten People. The one that Prime Minister John Howard likes is the one in which Menzies extols the virtues of the middle class – “salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers, and so on”.

But, in the light of this week’s revelations about Guantanamo Bay, Howard and his Attorney-General Philip Ruddock should read the other essays.

In one, Menzies wrote, “At this moment our men are fighting for our hearths and homes. Yes, but also for a free Parliament, for open and incorruptible courts of justice, for the even administration of laws freely enacted and honourably obeyed.

“If we think with horror and repugnance of Nazi tyranny it is because, under the brutish practices of the Putsch and the Gestapo, the law is no man’s protector, and the judges, ceasing to be his defenders, become the agents of oppression.

“Do not let us begin to think lightly of the law. Its rule, its power, its authority, are at the centre of our civilisation.”

Menzies was arguing that even in the midst of a nation-threatening struggle, the rule of law must prevail – in that instant that the High Court should determine whether the Federal Parliament had acted within the Constitution, but also more broadly.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 6 august 2005”