Water Tanks

I went to my financial planner this week to tell him about the results of a marvellous money-saving scheme.

It was a do-it-yourself scheme to replace at least part of the costly commercial supply of a scarce household item with my own “free” supply. Everyone should do it. I am talking about water, of course.

Why pay Actew $2.57 per thousand litres for water that falls free from the sky?

Then my financial planner pointed out some pertinent facts.

Canberra averages 600mm of rain. If you put that on a 200 square metre roof and allow for overflow waste and evaporation you get about 100,000 litres of water.

To collect that amount of water without wasting too much on overflow you would need at least a 4000-litre tank and associated plumbing from the gutters to the tank. You would also need a $600 pump. Total cost: around $3500.

You could buy the 100,000 litres of water from Actew for just $257.00.

So, the financial planner said, the $3500 spent on a rain-water tank is not an investment but a foolish act of consumption. You could put the $3500 to the mortgage and save about $300 a year tax-free and use the money to pay Actew and have some money left over.

So why do people bother with rain-water tanks? Why does the Government encourage people to put them in and, indeed, insist on it with new houses?

We put a tank in for two reasons. In the unlikely event we get to Stage 4 restrictions we want to save valuable plants, particularly irreplaceable mature ones. Secondly, you are not allowed to fill a swimming pool except by bucket unless you get an exemption. You can only get an exemption if you put an ugly, inconvenient “blanket” on the pool. This is irrespective of how low your other water consumption might be.

The swimming pool rules do not bear scrutiny. Swimming pools do not use very much water. Rather the water is being constantly treated and recycled. A pool will use much less water than lawn and about the same as an equivalent sized garden. Pools, particularly lap pools, are good for your health. But prejudice and the politics of envy demand strict rules.

As for government encouragement of tanks, it is more noise than reality. The ACT rebate scheme is pitiful compared to other jurisdictions. You only get a rebate if your tank is connected to a toilet or laundry inside the house. The cost of connection is not worth the rebate. In other jurisdictions, logic is applied. They say that any use of tank water will cut consumption of potable water so they give a rebate for tanks used solely for outside water.

In fact, it is precisely because tank water can be a substitute for potable water on gardens and to fill pools as well as in loos and laundries that tanks could be economic, despite the grim figures quoted above.

Those figures show a return of around 7 per cent for the tank, given that without the tank you would have to buy potable water. The return would be higher for tanks constructed more cheaply at the time the house is built.

Actew, on the other hand, aims for a return on capital of about 7.5%, so it is a fairly even field. ActewAGL has about $14 billion in assets and aims for a profit of $105 million. No doubt there are variations between its water, sewerage, electricity and communications arms, but they are not significant here.

But if demand for water required an expensive new dam, the profit level would fall. So it is in Actew’s interests (and the interests of the environment and the Government’s political interests) to put that day off for as long as possible, if not indefinitely.

Actew is in the odd position for a business: it wants customers to buy less of its product.

Actew has managed ACT’s water supplies pretty well through this drought. Unlike NSW it has exercised prudence rather than panic. NSW committed itself to an energy-guzzling desalination plant for Sydney in the middle of the crisis when dams were at 30 per cent and looks a bit silly now the dams are at 60 per cent. Rather than the grand gesture driven by a looming election, Actew has tweaked the supply with some clever, less expensive engineering and cut demand with some effective educational pressure to comply with some not-too-onerous water restrictions.

Unlike most other businesses, Actew has to deal with major public health and environmental matters as well as securing supply of an essential. Unlike a Mars Bar manufacturer it cannot put a sign up saying “Out of stock.”

Commercially, it means that when (and let’s hope it is not if) steadier rainfall returns and dams fill regularly, Actew will not make as much money as it did pre-drought. More people will have tanks and most people’s water-consumption habits will have fallen permanently.

Even so, Canberrans are still massive consumers of water on a world scale. And on world standards it is very cheap here – still too cheap for price to affect consumption. Consumption reductions have been achieved by education and force.

Water is charged at 77.5 cents for the first 100,000 litres; $1.67 for each of the next 100,000 litres and $2.57 for every 100,000 litres thereafter.

But if the $2.57 rate kicked in 100,000 litres earlier and a higher price was charged after 300,000 litres, the tank would become an economic proposition. New dams could be put off. Water security would improve and Actew’s revenues would rise and could be applied to reducing other rates.

In the meantime, tanks are simply not worth it unless you have a pool which the law prohibits you from filling from the tap.

Middle East

The flight into Egypt of tens of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza this week might provoke some rethinking by Palestinians into how they might improve their lives.

Gaza is a 360 square kilometre strip of land along the Mediterranean bounded by Israel and Egypt.

Its population of 1.5 million makes it one of the most densely populated places on the planet.

At international law it is part of no country. Egypt occupied it in 1948 after the dissolution of the British Palestinian Mandate and then Israel occupied it after the 1967 war.

Since the last Israeli settlers withdrew in 2005, it has notionally been governed by the Palestinian Authority, but in fact it has been controlled internally by Hamas for the past year. Israel controls the border, the coast and the airspace. It can determine what people, goods, and electricity cross the border. Without access to Israel and Israeli electricity, life in Gaza descends from the merely grim to utterly hellish. Small wonder when the border to Israel was closed most recently, people attempted to cross to Egypt for essentials.

Life in the other parcel of land notionally controlled by the Palestinian Authority but hemmed in by borders mostly under Israeli control – the West Bank – is better, but not a great deal better.

For Palestinians to get a better life they will have to change the reality-denying mindset instilled by Yasser Arafat when he led the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

This mindset was that Palestinians could rid Palestine (including what is now the state of Israel) of its Jewish population and that the use of violence was the way to do it.

Morality aside, it was and is illusory.

More than 5.6 million Jews live in Israel-Palestine. They are not going anywhere and they have too much military power to be removed, again leaving aside the morality of attempting to do so.

That being the case, Hamas, Fatah, the Palestinian Authority and Palestinians generally should renounce violence not only because violence is immoral, but because it is not achieving anything.

They should also recognise Israel’s right to exist because not doing so is not achieving anything.

Would that be total capitulation? No, it need not be.

What about a settlement? – a peace settlement or a political settlement? Well, the saga of seemingly endless attempts at negotiated “settlements” has been one of the main problems in the Middle East. President Bush’s lame-duck attempt this month was just the latest. Before that Oslo and Camp David were similar failures.

The idea of a negotiated settlement presumes there are two “sides”, like two nation states or two individuals who can come to an agreement and stick to it.

The Oslo agreement in 1993 came up with a two-state solution. A Palestinian state would be created from the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli state would comprise the rest. But the agreement broke down over borders; suicide bombings; Israeli attacks on Palestinian sites and the question of whether those Arabs (and their descendants) who left or were expelled from Israel in 1948 had a “right of return” and a right to claim compensation.

You can’t have two “sides” when so many people from each side are demanding a right to live in land the other claims.

None of this is doing the Palestinians any good. Even if they got their own state, would they be much better off? Inevitably it would be incompetently and corruptly run, as the running of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority show. And a state comprising the land-locked West Bank cut from the coastal enclave of Gaza would not be economically viable.

There is another course. Forget a separate state. The region already has one reasonably functioning state called Israel. Twenty per cent of its population is non-Jewish (mostly Moslem Arabs, but some Christians and Druze). That 20 per cent (or 1.4 million) is growing faster than the other 80 per cent.

Many Arabs living in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights (which were taken from Syria in 1967) have a right to Israeli citizenship, but refuse to take it up because they think it would be some kind of betrayal. They should take up Israeli citizenship. Palestinians in Gaza, West Bank and Golan Heights – far from seeking a separate state – should demand integration with Israel. Jews could settle in those territories and Arabs could buy property and live in Israel.

Oddly enough many hardline religious Jews would welcome a Greater Israel. It would comprise all the area presently controlled by Israel – Israel itself, Gaza, the whole of the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

Greater Israel offers the best long-term chance for peace, because of demographic forces. Not many Jewish immigrants are arriving in Israel these days – about 18,000 a year. The birth rate of Arab Israelis is much higher than Jewish Israelis. Arab Israelis will be a quarter of the population in 15 years.

Greater Israel has a population of between 10 million and 11 million (West Bank figures are disputed). Of them just a tad over half are Jewish. Given the birth figures it will not be long before the Jewish population is less than half.

With that demographic make up the state of Israel would have to become more secular and a society which embraced religious tolerance. Arabic would have to become one of several official languages.

So far from shunning Israeli citizenship and shunning Israel, the Palestinians should embrace it, and having abandoned violence take up representation in the Knesset and the other institutions of Greater Israel. That would be a more likely path to peace, dignity and prosperity than the mad attempts at “negotiated settlements” punctuated by sporadic episodes of destructive violence.

Mortgages

Treasurer Wayne Swan and his predecessor Peter Costello have had a glib response to bank bastardry – change banks.

Costello was referring to exorbitant fees and charges. Swan was referring to banks charging higher interest rates independently of the Reserve Bank’s cash rate.

The Treasurers have been condemned for impracticality. The costs and inconvenience of changing outweigh the benefits, particularly as there are only a few of them in Australia and there is not much between them anyway.

Swan must be ruing the day that the previous Labor Government began the process of privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank – the people’s bank, set up in 1911 by the Fischer Labor Government.

At least when the Commonwealth Bank was in Government hands it could hold the private banks in check with competitive pressure.

But now the big five can do pretty much as they like in pursuit of profit. In 2006-2007, the ANZ, NAB, Commonwealth, Westpac and St George Bank reported a 10.7 per cent rise in collective net profit to of $17.9 billion. Westpac alone was up 14 per cent to $3.5 billion.

They have put up their rates without any increase in the cash rate by the Reserve Bank. In the face of such good profits how an they justify it? They blame the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Well, yes, the sub-prime crisis is responsible, but not in the way the Australian banks contend.

As people in the US default on sub-prime mortgages – loans secured by over-valued properties by mainly non-bank lenders to people with poor finances – the lenders have to refinance, thereby making money scarcer and the price of money (interest rates) higher.

But the Australian banks have not been adversely affected to any great degree by what is happening in the US. To the contrary. The sub-prime crisis is making life hard for Australian non-bank lenders – such as RAMS. It means less competition. It means that in 2008 the big five banks can jack up their rates without a loss of market share to non-bank lenders in the way they suffered in the 1990s with people like Aussie Home Loans.

The good old days of low competition have returned for the banks, without even the restraining influence of a government-owned Commonwealth Bank.

Well, the Commonwealth Bank is not going to be re-nationalised, though the British Government is thinking of taking over a failed non-bank lender in Britain.

But a couple of things could be done to pressure the Australian banks. The banks want to maximise profits – if it means lower wages for their employees, poorer service, higher charges and a greater gap between they rate they borrow at and the rate they lend at, so be it. They will do that for as much as the market will bear.

At present the market – the customers – are just copping it. But customers can punish some banks and reward others by moving as much of their business as possible without incurring big transaction costs. It is fairly easy in these days of internet banking. It is easy enough to move all your cheque, savings and credit card accounts from one bank to another and leave the mortgage (the hard on to move) with the old bank.

Banks thrive on cheap deposits. Wages, salaries, professional fees and small-business takings pour into zero or low-interest cheque and savings accounts every day. A bank would not like the loss of the $60,000 to $150,000 which the average working Australian put through their bank account each year. Nor do they like losing credit card interest which so many customers incur despite their best intentions.

Moving accounts would have an effect, even if the mortgage stayed with the old bank because mortgages usually get paid out before full term when people sell to move. So the old bank would be on notice of gradual customer loss.

In the meantime, state and federal governments could do something about mortgages to make them more easily transferable.

At present, someone moving a mortgage faces bank and legal fees and state or territory land registration fees – both for removing the old mortgage and registering the new. All up it is several hundred dollars. The maximum difference between the five banks’ variable interest rate is only about 0.1 per cent, so it might take a couple of years to make the move worthwhile and in that time your new bank might easily raise its rates by more than your old one.

If Treasurer Swan is serious about people swapping banks for lower mortgage interest, he should talk to the states and territories about creating a new form of standard transferable residential mortgage – one that can be assigned from one bank to the other at the direction of the lender without involving Land Titles Offices.

If it is good enough for one bank to lend a certain amount on a house it should be good enough for another bank to take over the debt without a new valuation.

Sure, there would be some risks, but banks have been balancing risks against costs of comprehensive valuations and the monitoring of repayment capacity for decades.

The difficulty for Swan is that before the election Labor concentrated on keeping household costs, including the costs of mortgages, down. But an Australian Government of either complexion has little power to do much about it. And the events of the past couple of weeks suggest that it has even less power than was thought before the election. Not only can the Reserve Bank jack up rates independently, we now see that the commercial banks themselves can increase their rates irrespective of what the Reserve does and get away with it.

Australians are paying again for the sale of the Commonwealth Bank. It was sold between 1991 and 1996 at grossly lower than true value. At the 1991 float of 30 per cent of the bank, the Government sold shares at $5.40. They were 18 per cent higher two days later and are now more than 10 times that value, and that does not take into account dividend payments. A raft of middlemen fattened their wallets in the remaining two floats.

That aside, Australians have also lost a bulwark against rapacious behaviour by oligopoly of the few commercial banks for which they are now paying.

Suharto

So Suharto is to die in his bed instead of in a jail cell where he belongs.

The 86-year-old former Indonesian President is in hospital suffering from anemia and severe edema and receiving the best medical attention Indonesia has to offer – a far cry from the fate of thousands, perhaps millions, of Indonesians, Timorese, Acehnese, West Papuans and others who got in the way of his military rule.

Suharto got away with so much because of three doctrines of western diplomacy that prevailed from the 1950s until the late 1980s. The first was that any regime was better than a communist regime. The second was that a stable regime was always better than instability. And the third was a tacit agreement that targeting heads of government was not on – unless, of course, they were communists.

These doctrines overrode the fine ideals that US President Woodrow Wilson attempted to assert after World War I which included rights to self-determination, democracy and the rule of law.

It meant that throughout the world the US and many other western governments would support vicious regimes provided they were anti-communist. And in the name of freedom and liberty they opposed ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities that sought autonomy from these regimes.

In some respects it is still happening. Any regime is better than an Islamic fundamentalist regime. A stable friendly government – such as Turkey – is to be supported over minorities seeking autonomy, like the Kurds. And the only heads of government to be targeted are those accused of supporting Islamic terrorism

I was in Indonesia in 1996 when Suharto looked like he would continue in power for as long as he wanted. I was part of a visit by a group of editors, deputy editors and others organised by the Australia Indonesia Institute which was set up by the Australian Government to improve Australian-Indonesian understanding – very commendably stuff.

Surprisingly a last-minute interview was arranged with Suharto. We were whisked into a mini-bus. Seven police motor-cycles with lights flashing appeared from nowhere and we sliced through the Jakarta traffic to the Presidential Palace.

It was all very polite and gentle, but underneath Suharto was rigid as iron. No, there would be no autonomy of any kind for Timor. The president would continue to be chosen by the State Assembly (three quarters of whose members were army officers). The media would have to work with the aim of national unity to ensure economic growth, and so on.

In Jakarta and among the diplomatic elite the view was that the strongman would continue in office for a long time yet..

After the official part of our trip was over, I travelled through Java by third-class train and bus. The picture was different. People wanting to practise their English could be coaxed into volunteering their views on Suharto.

It seemed to me that the people would turn on Suharto as they had done against other dictators in other Third World countries and I wrote an opinion-feature piece to that effect. Ian Sharpe did a splendid illustration of a volcano about to go off to go with it.

It was wonderful to see Suharto go less than two years later after mass demonstrations against his rule.

But the sad thing is that in the ensuing 10 years, nothing much has been done to bring Suharto to justice. The world sadly does not have a robust system of international law to try heads of government who are alleged to have corruptly enriched themselves or tortured or killed their people.

There is a glimmer of hope. We have seen former heads of government Charles Taylor and Slobodan Milosevic in the dock and Augusto Pinochet came close. But, in general, governments are wary of an international justice system for former heads of state. Who knows who might be next? – George W. Bush for waging an aggressive war, even if against a tyrant.

Also, if you start prosecuting former heads of state it might bring up inconvenient facts, like the amount of support they got from western governments and it might give encouragement for minorities to air grievances, causing trouble for stable west-supporting governments.

Corruption charges were filed against Suharto, but they were dropped in 2006 because of his failing health. Attorney-General Supandji mentioned this again this week after some leading Indonesians, incredibly, sought a pardon for Suharto on the grounds that he did so much good nation building. Far from that, he left Indonesia riven with religious and ethnic violence and incapable of withstanding the Asian economic crisis.

The National Commission on Human rights is looking at six allegations involving the death, imprisonment and torture of various communist and separatist opponents, but it is taking its time.

A civil action is afoot to return several hundred million dollars allegedly siphoned off to the Suharto family. Again, it is slow.

Bizarrely, the only judgment brought down in the whole sorry saga was one in Suharto’s favour after he sued Time magazine for a 1999 article that alleged a corrupt amassing of a $15 billion family fortune. Suharto was awarded about $A125 million in damages.

Of course, muzzling the media is a key strategy of dictators.

That case is under appeal to the Supreme Court of Indonesia and with any luck Time will be successful.

But it will be small joy for the families of victims who will see justice escape them as Suharto dies in his bed surrounded by doctors, family and friends.

Beechworth

To this day I cannot swallow sweet soft drink. It makes me sick.

The events which caused this aversion were nearly 40 years ago, in January. And the heat of January, like this week, always reminds me of them.

I got a holiday job at Murray Breweries in my hometown of Beechworth. The brewery was hounded out of beer production in the 1920s by the temperance movement. In the 1960s it produced soft drink, particularly lemonade and its unique portello.

Nowadays it produces gourmet cordials.

Workers were allowed to drink as much soft drink as we wanted. In the factory heat you had to drink it however sick of it you were. We worked from 6am to 6pm with an hour for lunch.

I started sorting bottles: screw tops, crown tops, large, medium, small, paper labels, ceramic labels and so on. They then went to a bottle-washing machine. You turned the bottles upside down on to moving arms each of which took four bottles through a tunnel of steam and hot water jets. There was not much to clean from most bottles, but some contained caked dirt, leftover kerosene or great globs of black mould and had to go through the washer several times.

These days it is more economic to recyle than wash.

At the other end of the bottle washer, aged wizened Charlie grabbed the empties and put them one by one into a circular machine that squirted syrup, water and gas into each bottle and took them out the other side. His body was bent to the machine.

Charlie had started work at Murray Breweries two days before World War I ended when he reached school-leaving age. He was near retirement which coincided with him being replaced by a machine.

As the full bottles were put on a table by Charlie another worker put a blank screw top on each bottle. They were then picked up by another worker who put each bottle through the screw-capping machine.

This machine was the height of a man. The worker put the bottle on a small platform at waist high and press a pedal with his foot. This caused a slowly turning brass disc with a hole in its centre to descend upon the bottle, carving grooves into the screw cap, thus sealing the bottle. The worker then took the bottle from the machine, turned it upside down to ensure it was not leaking, put it in a box and sent the full boxes down the rollers for storage.

The screw-cap machine was remorseless, repetitive, pitiless work.

Meanwhile, down at the bottle-washer I began what was to be rapid promotion – not through any special ability or agility of mine – the work was unskilled and you had to work at the speed of the machines.

I was promoted because one day the young bloke on the screw-cap machine psychoed. He threw several bottles around and stormed out. So “Bluey” who had been putting the blank caps on each bottle was promoted to the screw-cap machine and I moved from bottle-washing to the blank-cap job.

“Bluey” was terrific at the screw-cap machine. He rarely got behind. His hands, arms and feet co-ordinated rhythmically.

In my mind’s ear, I can still hear that machine – the pedal and brass disc clicked and clunked in a two-bar drumming sequence that never changed.

In my mind’s eye, though, I will never forget what happened a few days later. “Bluey” got a bit blasé. He did not quite push a bottle to the back of the machine. So when the brass disc came down the neck of the bottle did not go into the hole at the disc’s centre. So the disc squeezed the bottle till it cracked and exploded.

A piece of glass tore up “Bluey’s” forearm and a gory mix of blood and soft drink went everywhere.

And I was promoted to the screw-cap machine.

Production went on. At Charlie’s machine every now and then a weak bottle would explode, but it at least had a guard which blocked most of the flying glass.

I worked at the screw-cap machine until university started. At least I knew there was light at the end of the tunnel. “Bluey” was happy. We saw him sitting on the footpath outside his parents’ house after work some days later – left arm and hand bandaged to the elbow and right hand clutching the neck of a large bottle of Victoria Bitter. He had been given three blessed weeks on full pay away from the cursed machines. On his return to work he stayed sorting bottles.

I don’t blame the factory owners. They did what was standard practice at the time – no better or worse than anyone else.

I relate this story because I saw an utterly foolish “remember when” ditty the other day. It painted a care-free life of the good old days when kids roamed free and pesky governments and busy bodies did not nag and interfere.

These were the good old days when industrial safety was sissy, when real men smoked and when seat belts were for woozes. These were the days before busy bodies put safety warnings on things. (Yes, there are a lot of over-the-top idiotic warning labels, but there are also a lot of idiots out there.)

Yes, the good old days when kids could get into medicine bottles, when little girls with pretty frilly pajamas got burned by unguarded bar heaters and where kids could cycle with the freedom of having wind blowing through their helmetless hair.

You know, when the death and injury rate from “accidents” was about treble what it is today.

My experience was fairly small beer, but it was salutary.

Qld woman most likely for High Cout

Usually judges outlast the governments that appoint them. Politicians face regular elections by a fickle public. Judges, on the other hand, are appointed till age 70 in the federal sphere.

But the Howard Government has been in place for more than 11 years. It has appointed five of the seven High Court judges. Now it has outlasted its second appointment – Justice Ian Callinan, who is due to reach the compulsory retirement age set by the 1977 amendment to the Constitution on September 1. A new appointment must be made. Who is it likely to be? What effect will the appointment have?

The other two justices – William Gummow and Michael Kirby – were appointed by the previous Labor Government.

The appointment of High Court judges is, in effect,is the gift of the Prime Minister, though the High Court Act requires the Federal Attorney-General to consult with state Attorneys-General. That change was made by The Fraser Government after suggestions that the wicked, centralist socialists in the Labor Party would stack the court with their own kind and trammel states rights.

It fact the process is fairly meaningless. NSW Attorney-General John Hatzistergos has accused the Commonwealth of ignoring state recommendations to other bodies and the president of the Australian Bar Association, Stephen Estcourt, among others, wants an overhaul of how High Court judges are selected.

In all, though, the Howard Government’s appointments to the High Court – unlike other bodies – have been relatively free from political bias and jobs for mates. That can perhaps be put down to the fact that it is not difficult for conservative governments to find conservative judicial appointments because the cream of the legal profession are fairly conservative, as is the judicial process itself, whereas a reformist government seeking a reformist appointment has to pick someone who wears their activist or reformist attitudes on their sleeve.

Federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock can simply ignore the states’ suggestions. He also consults state and territory Bar associations. Again he can ignore them. However, the process is at least useful in ensuring no-one gets overlooked or that anyone with a skeleton in the closet is not likely to get appointed. This is more possible these days, than say 30 years ago, because there are so many judges and the Federal Attorney could not be expected to know all of them.
Of the five Howard appointments (six if you count the elevation of Gerard Brennan to the Chief Justiceship), Callinan was perhaps the most controversial on a couple of accounts. He was appointed in February 1998 shortly after former Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer called for the appointed of a “capital-C conservative” – a reaction to High Court land-rights decisions unfavourable to the National Party cause.

Callinan, before and after his appointment, has been an unabashed states’ righter. It is difficult to see how the Government could find and appoint someone to replace those states’ rights credentials. Indeed, Callinan’s states’ rights views have been so strong that he would have struck down the Government’s industrial-relations laws on the ground they would have usurped state industrial-relations laws – but he was in the minority.

So it seems that the court is to become slightly less conservative and in favour of states’ rights with the next appointment.

Callinan also comes from Queensland. The big question is whether his replacement will come from Queensland. It would be difficult for the Government to appoint from NSW or Victoria given all of the other six justices come from those states.

That said Ruddock has consistently said that appointments are made “on merit”. State representation; the “need” for more women or the “need” for representation of a particular segment of society should be ignored, he says.

It is perhaps easier to rule out than rule in prospective appointments. NSW and Victoria are probably out, though Commonwealth Solicitor-General David Bennett (NSW) is in with a chance despite being over 60 because he has argued very difficult cases for the Howard Government on immigration, security and workplace laws. He might have a better chance when the next vacancy comes up next year, if the Government is still in power.

Tasmania has no candidate who the legal profession would think suitably qualified. South Australia has its Chief Justice and former Solicitor-General John Doyle who is highly regarded as a lawyer, but at 62, probably two old. Governments like to get 10 years out of their judges. He should have been appointed years ago.

An appointment directly from the Bar of any state is unlikely. Other than Callinan, it has been 30 years since there was an appointment straight from the Bar. Other appointments have all been judges, Attorneys-General or Solicitors-General. There are more courts with more judges these days, so Governments can see someone’s judicial flavour rather than choosing from the Bar where a person’s judicial leanings are less obvious.

Two female Western Australian Supreme Court are a chance. Justice Christine Wheeler was the first female senior counsel in the state and Justice Carmel McLure. Justice McLure worked for former Liberal Attorney-General Senator Peter Durack in the Fraser Government.
The Chief Justice of Queensland Paul de Jersey has been mentioned. He is 58. He has spoken out about judicial activism. But you would have to query whether a Chief Justice from any of the three main eastern states would take an appointment as a puisne judge on the High Court.

Queensland Supreme Court Justice and former Queensland Solicitor-General Patrick Keene is a possibility.

But as it happens there is a fairly neat alignment of circumstances for the Government that it can safely appoint a Queenslander and win applause across the legal professional spectrum and among people who would like to see more women on a court that has only had two women members in its 104 year history. Susan Kiefel is a judge of the Federal Court of Australia, based in Brisbane. She is highly thought of in the profession and would be a safe, fairly conservative judicial appointment – certainly not a judicial activist.

Whoever wins the next election will get to make appointments in 2008 and 2009. Then there are no appointments till 2015, presuming no deaths or early retirements.

The surprising thing is that since Callinan’s appointment in 1998, there has not been much public debate about the way High Court judges are appointed, given the huge influence the court has – directly and indirectly – over our lives.

Perhaps there is a lesson there for governments: if you go for good legal competence and good judicial track records in lower courts, agitation for changes to the appointment method that might reduce or constrain your power over appointments will go away.

Election Budget from Stanhope

Athletes say, “No pain, no gain”.
Last year’s ACT Budget was full of pain: big taxes increases; new taxes; slashes to health and slashes to education.
This year’s Budget has some gains. They are not spectacular, not gold medals nor even personal bests. But they do set the groundwork for Labor’s Jon Stanhope to be re-elected in 2008. Continue reading “Election Budget from Stanhope”

Forum for Saturday 31 march 2007 Swamped by law

The Chief Justice of the High Court, Murray Gleeson, was bemoaning regulatory overload this week. He cited the Corporations Law, which had increased tenfold in the past 20 years. My guess is the volume of various taxation Acts would have gone up perhaps twenty-fold in that time.

”We have a constant problem in the High Court, for example, with identifying the statute that’s relevant to the case that we have to decide because these statutes are amended so often,” Gleeson said. ”If you compare the amount of legislative output of a modern parliament with the legislative output of 100 or 50 years ago, the change is extraordinary.” Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 31 march 2007 Swamped by law”

Warning on federal IP assets

The Government has done nothing about the management of its $7 billion worth of intellectual property despite being warned about the neglect three years ago, the Australian National Audit Office says in its latest report.

The Audit Office recommended three years ago that the Commonwealth produce a whole-of-government policy statement and management guidelines. It said the task should be led by Attorney-General’s, Finance and the Department of Communications Information Technology and the Arts. The departments agreed.

Intellectual property is intangible property like computer software (about half the $7 billion), medical and scientific inventions, copyright in documents, logos and designs.

Three years after the 2004 recommendations, the Audit Office said in a report to Parliament tabled last week, “By December 2006, the overarching approach and guidance on IP management was not finalised. . . . It is still not clear when either the IP Principles or the IP Manual can be expected to be finalised or released.”

This is despite a joint parliamentary committee agreeing on the recommendations of the 2004 report and setting a deadline of May 2006.

The Audit Office said that many agencies had done nothing because they were waiting for the whole-of-government statements.

It said without proper management there was a danger the property could be lost, stolen or not used to best advantage either in revenue or in proper public use.

Lift game, shadow AG tells lawyers

By CRISPIN HULL

Lawyers should lift their game and abandon expensive overseas conferences and stop abusing professional privilege, according to the shadow attorney-general, Nicola Roxon.

She said also that barristers’ immunity from being sued for negligence, recently upheld by the High Court, should be abandoned.

She told the inaugural Australian Women Lawyers conference in Sydney yesterday (Friday 29 September) that incidences of “lawyers behaving badly” were not symptomatic of the whole profession but they could not be dismissed as on-offs.

She cited a legal education conference in a US ski resort and a two-day conference in Prato, Italy, on the cost of justice with the conference dinner in a palace.

She cited lawyers’ roles in the $5.3 billion HIH collapse and the concealment of documents in the AWB and tobacco cases and the failure of some barristers to pay tax.

She accused public-sector lawyers of behaving badly in serving their departments and ministers rather than the public through obstruction in freedom-of-information cases, over-vigilant pursuit of welfare and refugee cases and coming up with the Pacific solution.

It did not help that at the head of the legal profession Attorney-General Philip Ruddock was prepared to use people’s fears for political purposes by suggesting the recent Western Australian native title case would prevent access to Perth beaches and parks and by linking David Hicks’s case to the recently drawn out NSW rape cases.

She said that she would defend the courts and not take part in under-mining them if she were Attorney-General.

Ms Roxon said that lawyers behaving badly threatened to undermine the much greater good that the legal profession did. She cited the huge amount of pro bono (free) work done for those who could not afford it. She also cited the good done by legal professional bodies in standing up for human rights. She said the great majority of the profession worked well, but was being let down.

Middle Australia thought of the legal profession as being only for the very rich or very poor; too costly and too riddled with delay.

This threatened confidence in the courts.

“There is a public good in peaceful and just resolution of disputes,” she said.

Ultimately, if people’s views of the legal profession and the legal system did not improve it would undermine the rule of law and threaten “our peaceful, stable and prosperous society”.

She said the immunity for barristers undermined confidence in the system. Its message was: “We have special rules. If you are negligent we will sue you, but if we are negligent you cannot sue us”.

She thought that legislation should be passed to overrule the immunity after debate among the professional bodies.

She called on lawyers to do more pro bono work; do more work with non-government organisations; speak out against abuse of professional privilege and support alternative dispute resolution.