Crispin Hull

T HE 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.” Indeed it is. I did the comparison. In 1955 the Commonwealth Parliament passed a single volume of legislation of 580 pages. In 2005 it passed seven volumes of legislation. It was not even courageous enough to number the pages. The numbering begins afresh with each Act. There were at least 4000 pages in 2005.

The Commonwealth is passing more Acts and the average length of them is increasing. Last year it passed 210 Acts. The federal, state and territory parliaments churn out legislation at an absurd rate. NSW was the worst offender last year. It passed 250 Acts; the Feds 210, Victoria 180, the ACT and Queensland 60 each, and Tasmania 50. I am rounding these off, and as some legislation comes into force a year after it is enacted they may not be completely accurate. You could add at least another 100 for Western Australia and South Australia. Time prevents me from extracting a more precise number of Acts from those states. In all, more than 800 Acts were

passed by Australian Parliaments last year, say 200,000 pages. Sure, quite a few were amending Acts. Precious few were repeals at least without longer and more detailed versions being enacted in their place. Mercifully, in this electronic age, fewer people and institutions are buying the printed versions or we would have no forests left. We have about 1500 consolidated federal Acts in force about 30,000 pages. You can treble that if you add the states’ and territories’ legislation. But wait. There’s more. I haven’t even counted the regulations made under these Acts. Often the regulations are longer than the Acts they are made under. You wouldn’t mind so much if it did some good. But all the evidence points the other way. Take the tenfold increase in Corporations Law mentioned by Gleeson, for example. We still got HIH, the biggest corporate collapse in Australia’s history, which made the 1960s Reed Murray and the Poseidon nickel collapses of the
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 31 march 2007 Swamped by law”

FORGET LABOR, the Greens will be rubbing their hands at the latest opinion polls. Even if you shave a few per cent either way for a margin of error or a change in opinion, the Greens are set to do what they have not achieved before: hold the balance of power in the Senate on their own. And they are being very quiet about it. Let’s come back to the Senate later. First, let’s look at what these polls mean for the Prime Minister’s seat of Bennelong. Bennelong and Eden-Monaro are now the litmus seats on the Mackerras pendulum. Bennelong’s boundaries have been changed several times in recent years each time moving it further west

into Labor territory and away from the North Shore Liberal territory. On an even swing Labor needs these seats to win Government. Now, it might win some safer Coalition seats and lose some more marginal seats. But overall, if Labor wins, it will be more likely that Howard will lose Bennelong than win it. It should be an unremarkable result.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 24 March 2007 Greens will hold balance in Senate”

The housing market seems to defy logic. Last week several suburban records and the overall Canberra record for a house price were broken.

So much for a bust following the boom, or even a slight cooling off. What is happening?

We have plenty of land. Governments, which have the power, profess a desire to do something about it. Australia has one of the most efficient home-building industries in the world.

Yet the price of dwellings as a proportion of income is among the highest in the world.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 10 March 2007 capital gains tax”

Electoral systems are extremely important. They can change the fate of nations, or even the world. Ask Al Gore.

This week Gore picked up an Oscar for his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. In 2000 he won more votes than George Bush but Bush took the White House because the US has an odd electoral system under which each state gets a number of votes in an Electoral College equal to the number of representatives and senators it has in the Congress. Bush won enough states to give him a majority in the Electoral College.

The Australian Electoral system is similarly defective. In Australia the winner is the party which gets a majority of seats, not necessarily the party which is preferred by a majority of voters.
Continue reading “Forum for saturday 3 march 2007 NZ german system”

Developments in the past couple of weeks will cause a bit of consternation among the pay TV operators.

Subscriptions to high-speed internet connections have overtaken those for dial-up. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures this week show that nearly four million households and businesses have high-speed internet connections, doubling in the 18 months to September.

Perhaps the main reason for the explosion is that there is so much good material on the internet, in particular podcasting, where you can download broadcast material to be listened to on you ipod or MP3 player whenever you want.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 24 February pay television”

This is a tale of everyone in government saying they agree that something should be done, but no-one actually doing it.

It is a tale of economic mis-management by a Government that prides itself on economic good management.

It is a tale of buck-passing and putting something into the “too-hard” basket.

And it is the tale of not looking after about $7 billion dollars worth of taxpayers’ assets.

It starts in 2003 when the Australian National Audit Office began looking at how agencies handle their intellectual property. This is the intangible property created by intellectual effort – things like computer software, photographs, recordings, inventions (medical and scientific), documents, logos, designs, drawings, diagrams, music and the like.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 17 February 2007 intellectual property”

A psephologist studies elections. The word comes from the Greek psephos (pronounced sea-foss) meaning stone. The ancient Greeks cast their votes by putting a stone in a container bearing the name of their preferred candidate.

A couple of millennia on, Malcolm Mackerras is, in my view Australia’s foremost psephologist.

Incidentally, Mackerras insists the word should be pronounced as “sea-follogist” because the Greek e is an eta not an epsilon. For the best part of three decades he has crunched the numbers. He has explained the swing necessary to change government in every state, territory and federal election and invented the Mackerras pendulum which shows the point at which governments change.

Over that time he has worked out the effect of every boundary change, diligently poring through the voting results at every polling booth and extrapolating the consequences if that booth is moved to another electorate. He has an amazing knowledge of electorates and voting patterns.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 10 February voting”

Australian consumers – including businesses — are getting all the disadvantages of a telecommunications monopoly and none of the advantages.

Developments over the past fortnight show how successive governments have made an utter hash of telecommunication policy – through ideology, the Dublin syndrome, political opportunism and a failure to have a clear industry policy with national goals.

The main advantage of a monopoly is that it prevents wasteful duplication. You only have to have one margarine factory; one road network; one defence force or one telecommunications network. The other advantage is that the community gets a service that it otherwise might not get: defence, roads, rural post services and so on.

But monopolies get complacent and bureaucratic and can abuse their position by over-charging. Often those disadvantages outweigh the advantage of no duplication.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 3 February 2007 telecommunications”