Crispin Hull

It is a mark of Australian affluence that such as question is asked. In an affluent society such as Australia many people have everything they need or want. If during the year they want something they just buy it, so come Christmas time there is no obvious thing to buy them.

Sure, there are plenty of people not so well off who might have quite a large Christmas list. But in Australia, my guess is that most of it would be stuff people do not really need — stuff that would find its way into landfill before very long.

One of the great lies in the last election campaign was that a great chunk of Australians are “doing it tough”. Comparatively, they might be. They might not have a widescreen TV like the Joneses, or a car for every teenager in the family like the Smiths, but they are not “doing it tough”.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 15 December 2007 foreign aid”

There is only one thing worse than a public monopoly, and that’s a private one.

Before the new Government could even have its first Cabinet meeting, Telstra was flexing its privatised muscles this week. One of its aggressive US executives, Group Managing Director. Phil Burgess, said he wanted Telstra to be a “premium provider charging premium prices”.

We all know about Telstra’s premium prices, especially when it is providing a service that no-one else can provide because it has got a monopoly on the network – whether it is a twisted copper wire to the home, the fibre to the node or the Next G tower in a rural area.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 8 December 2007 telstra”

The temporary arrangement for the Prime Minister’s accommodation should come to an end.

Eighty years is far too long for the head of government to be shacked up in a temporary residence.

This week we had some uncertainty as to whether the Rudds would move into the Lodge fuelled by an unfortunate phrase by the Prime Minister-elect’s wife, Therese Rein, who said she was in the capital to investigate possible schools for their son Marcus “if” they were to move to Canberra.

It was later clarified by her husband who said that the family would definitely be moving to Canberra, as is Labor policy.

From the very earliest days in Canberra the Federal Capital Commission recognised that the city would have a modest start but it planned for greater things.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 1 December 2007 lodge”

My fellow Australians. I have just telephoned the Leader of the Australian Labor Party Mr Rudd and conceded that the Coalition has lost the election. I congratulated him and his party.

I would like to thank those who voted for us, my staff, and Coalition candidates for the magnificent effort they put in over the past six weeks.

I thought until yesterday that the polls had got it wrong or if they had got it right that there would be a last-minute change and voters would ultimately turn back to the Coalition.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 24 November 2007 howard’s defeat speech”

Some public servants might well have shuddered at the National Press Club yesterday (Nov 21) afternoon.

Kevin Rudd confirmed, “When I talk about a razor gang . . . I’m deadly serious.”

But one other person might have shuddered more: Greens Senate candidate Kerrie Tucker.

If Kerrie Tucker is to unseat Liberal Senator Gary Humphries she will be relying on a lot of overflow from Labor’s Senator Kate Lundy.
Continue reading “Op-ed-analysis piece on Tucker-Humphries”

Thirty-five years ago when I was in my 20s, I signed a contract for the construction of a pick-a-plan house in an outer suburb.

I was saved by luck not good management. I knew nothing of passive solar heating, but the builder did. Choosing one of the floor plans was easy enough. Putting it on the land was another matter. Most builders would have left the floor plan as is, banged the front door to the front of the block and that would have been that.

The trouble was that the front boundary of the block faced north-north-west. The only way to get north orientation was to turn the house 45 degrees. Radical stuff in 1972. Houses always ran parallel to the street – to show the world what a big house you have.

The builder turned the house 45 degrees and moved the large sliding glass door on the pick-a-plan to the northern wall. Total cost: nothing. It could be done because the block was big enough to accommodate the house’s diagonal across its width.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 17 November”

Opinion pollsters love elections. For a start they get lots of publicity virtually free as they are plastered all over the media. More importantly they get a taxpayer-funded audit on the soundness of their methods and work which they can flog around the commercial world.

People in commerce want to know what people are thinking. Car manufacturers want to know whether people prefer fuel economy over safety, environment over power, comfort over performance and so on. Cosmetic manufacturers want to know whether people care about animal experiments and so on. So they want to know whether the polling company, or its commercial arm, can give them sensible answers for a reasonable cost.

Pollsters can answer this question. In the aftermath of an election, a pollster can point to a poll of voters immediately before an election in which they predicted that X per cent said they would vote Labor and Y per cent would vote Coalition. And also point to the actual result in which X per cent, plus or minus a tad, actually voted Labor and Y per cent, plus or minus a tad, voted Coalition.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 3 November 2007 opinion poll”

Maybe Francis Fukuyama had it wrong at the end of the Cold War when he talked about the “end of history”.

His predictions might have been more accurate if he had taken it one step at a time and first spoken about the end of economics.

Fukuyama thought that by 1990 the Marxist idea of the end of history occurring when the contradictions in capitalism caused it to eat itself was obviously wrong. Instead, with the commies were out of the way, ideological wars would end. Liberal democracy would be the world order. The great lists of trouble spots and wars that pepper the reportage of international relations would be at an end. It would be the end of history – in the sense of history being the story of titanic struggles between ideologies, the contest of ideas, wars and power struggles.

Liberal democracy had won, he thought.

Ho-hum. Fukuyama has not been alone. Even at a national level in Australia leaders have suggested that on their patch there would be a sort of end of history – an end to the great tussle of ideas.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday October 25 history economics”

Greens leader Bob Brown has been spruiking the possibility of the Greens winning an ACT Senate seat from Liberal Gary Humphries. He’s dreaming.

The community-based group GetUp is also running its Save Our Senate campaign strongly in the ACT in an attempt to overturn the Coalition majority in the Senate.

On that point, the ACT is critical. This is because ACT (and Northern Territory) senators take their seats immediately after the election. Senators from the states, on the other hand, take their seats on 1 July next year. State senators have a fixed six-year term. Half are elected every three years, usually at the same time as the House of Representatives election, but their terms run from the next July 1 to the June 30 six years later.

Territory senators terms are exactly the same as the terms of members of the House of Representatives.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 20 October 2007 greens in Senate”

Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd’s proposal for four-year fixed terms is like deciding to buy a new stove for the kitchen. Like a stove, elections are the working part of Australian constitutional democracy, but not its totality.

As you look at removing the old stove you realise it is attached to cupboards, so you will probably need new cupboards – not just either side of the stove but matching ones for the whole kitchen. That would then mean a new sink, dishwasher and splashbacks. So you may as well re-tile the floor and repaint. The power points, light switches and light fittings would complete the job.

Rudd thinks that Prime Minister John Howard has been playing games with the timing of this election. He argues that the uncertainty of the date has been highly inconvenient – for politicians and their staff who have spent the past couple of weeks thinking they might have to return to Canberra for a parliamentary sitting. He is right. Business and the public service would also like more certainty with election dates.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 13 October 2007 four year terms”