Month: June 2006

Common-law principles say you can do whatever you like on your own land, provided you let nothing escape from it. You can build as high as you like. You can shut out the light and you can block out the views of others, and it is just too bad.

But that is the common law. Obviously, in towns and cities that would be unworkable. So we have invented town planning. Governments have given power to departments, authorities and councils to regulate building so we can be confident that the places in which we live are not made unbearable.

And therein lies a tension: the desire of a landowner to do whatever he or she wants and the desire of those who live nearby to ensure that any building or activity does not make their living conditions worse. Added to this tension is an over-arching public good in renewal, efficiency and aesthetics of the built form.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 24 june 2006 nca”

Last weekend Kim Beazley was wallowing like a pleisosaur in a shrinking pond. He announced that he would return Australia to the 1950s. He would abolish all Australian Workplace Agreements and return industrial relations to collective bargaining.

So it is not only John Howard and the conservatives who want to return Australia to the 1950s. Labor has joined the fray. Both sides of politics – insofar as there are “sides” any more – have now picked out awful elements of 1950s Australia and said this is the way forward.

Of all the things for Beazley to differentiate himself with Howard on he chose perhaps the worst – industrial relations. Yet he has gone to jelly on so many other issues, especially refugees and civil rights in the war on terror.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday17 june 2006 unions”

The contributors to the letters column and talk-back radio this week were utterly perplexed.

How is it, they asked, that the ACT Government could propose a Budget that cuts 39 schools yet leaves intact funding for a dragway and a visiting football team?

It was the classic stuff of politics.

The first rule is survival.

The ideal political world is like the economist’s perfect market – healthy competition of ideas or goods put to the choice before fully informed voters or consumers. In the ideal world the political leader aims at doing the best for the community as a whole and the fully informed voters see the obvious merit of the actions and votes the leader back into office.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday10 june 2006 budget”

The law defining a refugee has not changed over the years, but the practice of it sure has. But then again, circumstances have changed quite markedly.

This week saw Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock step up the campaign against people smuggling and illegal boat arrivals. Some would say his measures verge on the hysterical. Videos of crocodiles, snakes, sharks and desert are to be sent to countries where the illegals are mainly coming from these days: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan. There is not much point in sending them to Afghanistan where the Taliban extremist government has in effect banned television. Ruddock has upped the hysteria at home, citing the case of a war criminal coming in with the boat people and cases of possible disease. The criminal was not named, nor the country he came from, nor were the diseases mentioned, nor was any concern raised about the possibility of these diseases running rampant through the detention centres where the illegals are housed. Ruddock said that one in 10 of the illegals would fit the profile of interest for anti-terrorist bodies. Not that they were in fact terrorists, mind you, just that they would fit the profile of concern.
Continue reading “2000_06_june_immig for forum”

On one of the very few occasions one the Government’s “anti-terror” laws got some thorough scrutiny it was found to be over the top.

This week the Australian Law Reform poured a very reasoned bucket over the sedition sections in last year’s Anti-Terrorism Act. At the time the Government pushed ahead with the laws despite widespread condemnation.

The laws read like something out of a tinpot dictatorship or Tudor England.

They make utterances of seditious intent punishable by seven years’ jail and define “seditious intention” as meaning “an intention to use force or violence to effect any of the following purposes:
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 3 june 2006 sedition”