Month: November 2005

The Australian industrial relations system has been flawed since Federation more than a century ago.

It goes back to the Constitution which limits the Commonwealth’s industrial relations power to deal with industrial disputes that cross state boundaries. The Founding Fathers’ aim was to limit Commonwealth power.

The opposite occurred. National unions were created in order to create the inter-statedness required to attract federal jurisdiction. And disputes were created to attract the constitutional “dispute” require. The result was decades of disruptive national dispute and a whole industrial-relations system predicated upon friction, mistrust and hostility. Yet in most businesses the interests of employees and employers are similar.

This is about to change. This week the Coalition introduced its industrial-relations changes. The changes are possible because of two things: a Coalition majority, of sorts, in the Senate and an evolution in the view of the High Court about the Commonwealth power.

A number of cases now suggest that virtually any law saying a corporation can or cannot do something will fall within the Commonwealth’s corporations power. The earlier view was that the corporations power was more limited. So a law saying corporations will do their industrial relations this way, not that way, will be valid.
Continue reading “Forum for Saty 5 November 2005 unions”

A large step in the evolution of personal computing has taken place, largely unnoticed, in the past month or so.

The world has about 600 million personal computers. About 130 million of them are made each year and perhaps as many as 70 million are discarded – some, no doubt, thrown out of office windows in blind fury.

In this huge market, Microsoft has almost a monopoly. More than 90 per cent of the PCs run the Microsoft Windows operating system and about 80 per cent of them run Microsoft Office which bundles word-processing, spreadsheet, presentation, database, email and organising software.

Windows costs about $80. The recommended retail price for Office is $850. Not many pay that, but many do. Others pirate (though at $850 you have to wonder who the pirates are), or buy student or multiple licences at a discount.

Even so, it amounts to tens of billions of dollars going to Microsoft and making its founder, Bill Gates, the richest man on earth. The profit margins are huge because it costs so little to produce a copy of the software – less than $1 for the CD and a couple of dollars for the packaging

Now a serious challenge to the accumulation of those mountains of money has begun. OpenOffice Version 2 went out on the internet. It does virtually everything Microsoft Office does and more.
Continue reading “Forum for saturday 26 nov microsoft”

Maybe the 2008 Beijing Olympics Games will be another example of there being only one thing worse than not getting what you want – that’s getting it.

Well, that’s at least what it might turn out to be for the Chinese totalitarian leadership.

I got an inkling of this a week ago when I gave a talk on media law to a group of 20 officers from the Beijing Public Security Bureau – or police force.

They were from the media-management section and are in Australia to learn the ways of western media so that they might make their Games run more smoothly.

When you talk to an Australian audience about media law, most of the interest is the relationship between the private citizen and the media, particularly defamation, privacy and other complaints about media behaviour.

The Chinese were much more interested in the relationship between the arms of government and the media.

A huge amount of foreign and local private investment is pouring into Chinese industries, with one notable exception – the media.

A couple of months ago the Chinese Government issued a clarifying statement about earlier statements encouraging foreign and local private investment in cultural industries. Many thought the earlier statement would pave the way for foreign Chinese-language magazines, the establishment of local privately owned newspapers, more freedom for the internet and foreign and local shareholding in newspapers and television stations.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 19 November beijing”

Thirty years ago the trouble was that the Government did not have majority in the Senate.

The trouble now is that it does. At least from a Labor perspective.

The past week’s outpourings in the lead up to the 30th anniversary of the dismissal divided along predictable lines: republican-Labor saying that Governor-General John Kerr acted unconstitutionally – in effect exercising a coup – and constitutional monarchist-conservatives saying what he did was perfectly legal and within the Constitution Coalition.

There is some difficulty with the Labor-republican view. If Kerr did sack Whitlam unconstitutionally, redress presumably could have been sought in the High Court, the upholder of constitutional legality. But it was not and could not have been, because the words of the Constitution are as plain as day – the Governor-General appoints the ministers of the Government. And the Governor-General is appointed by the Monarch, who holds office under the principles of hereditary and divine right.

Nearly all the time, the Governor-General appoints ministers according to the advice of the leader of the party that can muster a majority in the House or Representatives.
Continue reading “forum for 12 Nov 2005 the dismissal”