Month: October 2005

Anyone awakened before 5am day after day is bound to be grumpy.

The world has strife and inconvenience enough on it own accord without us deliberately making it more inconvenient.

I am a really grumpy old man this week. Bird flu, the Pakistan earthquake and terrorism are natural visitations or the visitations of the irrational, and so inescapable. But why do supposed sophisticated, intelligent, cutting-edge, service-focused, design-oriented organisations and governments make life a misery – turning cultivated, educated, pleasant, unassuming people like me into raving, mouth-frothing, grumpy old men?

Grump 1 is daylight saving. Why, in the name of civil government, do the vast majority of south-eastern and south-western urban dwellers in Australia have to be dictated to by the rural rump? Throughout October we are awakened at 4.52am (on average) as the sun rises. If we can tolerate the sun rising in late March at 6.53am why can’t we do the same in spring and have the daylight at the end of the day?

There is a solution. We must convince John Howard and the state Premiers that terrorists are using the early daylight hours in spring to plot acts of violence, so it will necessary in the interests of national security to institute a sensible daylight saving regime. Forget state boundaries. Daylight saving will begin on the first weekend in October in an area from south-east Queensland through the eastern half of NSW, all of Victoria and Tasmania and the south-east of South Australia and the south-west of Western Australia. It will end on the last week of March.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 29 oct 2006 daylight”

The code of ethics of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (the journalists’ union) says, “Where confidences are accepted, respect them in all circumstances.”

Maybe the MEAA code goes too far. I cannot see why confidences should be kept in ALL circumstances. Someone might tell you of a threatened act of violence or breach of the law. You might then have a duty to disclose the source if that was the only to prevent the violence.

But, in general, confidences should be kept because it is in the public interest that journalists keep confidences. If they do not, sources will dry up and so will the flow of information.

Chief Minister Jon Stanhope is not a journalist, but confidentiality principles apply to politicians as well.

Important flows of information – particularly between levels of government — will dry up if politicians do not respect confidences.

So was Stanhope wrong to put the draft terrorism law on his website?

Well, it depends on the timing and nature of the confidence and the over-riding public interest.

Timing is important. To be binding you need to extract the agreement on confidentiality before handing over the information. You cannot impose a confidence upon someone after you give the information. When information is given verbally, you have a sequence: a request for confidence; an acceptance that the confidence will be respected; and the giving of the information.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 22 oct 2005 stanhope’s confidence”

This week the footnote comes first, because it is more important than the argument on voluntary voting.

Australia describes itself as a compassionate, tolerant and generous society. Rubbish. At a time when compassion to Muslim communities might seem especially important, what has our response been to the Pakistan earthquake? — $10 million from the Government. It sounds big. And less than $300,000 from individuals. In all, just 51.5 cent each and just 1.5 cents each from individuals — all those people who wallow into McDonalds and Harvey Norman buying junk they don’t need – including the very widescreen television sets which have so graphically displayed the suffering. Can’t we do better than 1.5 cents each or 51.5 cents each as a society?

The compassion, tolerance and generosity go no deeper than the hemline on the hip pocket.

Try visiting http://www.redcross.org.au, or call 1800 811 700 toll free, or send a cheque to GPO Box 9949 Canberra City. If not, we must substitute the words “selfish, intolerant and mean” for the words “compassionate, tolerant and generous”. 1.5 cents per person is utterly shameful.

End of footnote.

Voluntary voting was raised again this week – this time the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters into the 2004 election said it should be looked at. It recommended also that four-year terms should be put to a referendum; that electronic voting should be introduced and funding procedures should be tightened because some candidates were profiteering by getting more in electoral funding than they were spending.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 15 October voting”

Just after Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, the Zimbabwean Government had an ingenious method of assessing land tax on the then fairly wealthy white farmers.

Farmers could value their land however the liked. The lower the value, the less land tax. But the catch was that the self-assessed value became the value for compulsory acquisition, according to a Canberra Times journalist who travelled there and reported on it at the time. The system was a surefire way to prevent low tax assessment.

That was in the days before Mugabe became a tyrant and just stole the land, destroying the economy in doing so.

I was reminded of this earlier in the week when the NSW Ombudsman, Bruce Barbour, brought down his report into land tax in NSW. As land tax systems go, the Zimbabwean one was effective and efficient.

The NSW system, on the other hand, is – pardon the epithet used for African hellholes – a basket case.

Barbour concluded that the system used by the NSW Valuer-General resulted in “an unacceptable risk of error in a considerable number of valuations”.

More than a third of valuations were outside the acceptable margin of error of 15 per cent.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 8 oct land tax”

Jon Stanhope was the last Australian head-of-government standing up for the principles of liberal democracy, the rule of law and the separation of powers. Now he, too, has capitulated. The mouse that roared now squeaks.

He was sucked into the false importance of the private briefing. He was made to feel that he now “knows”. He “knows” what the voters cannot be told, now that the intelligence services have told him that we are in danger and why we are in danger.

These, by the way, are the same intelligence services who advised us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that we were in danger from them.

So, we are to have laws that enable people to be detained for up to 14 days without charge or trial. We are to have laws under which people who have not been charged can be subjected to a restraining order for up to a year – restraining them within their homes (house arrest), within a suburb or a town, or preventing them from associating with certain people.

What does that remind you of? It reminds me of the banning orders in apartheid South Africa. It reminds me of what the military government in Burma is doing to Aung San Suu Kyi.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 1 October 2005 terror laws”