Crispin Hull

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”

In the days of union domination of the workplace most awards had redundancy provisions. Failing that there was a fairly standard practice of the Industrial Relations Commission to write them in as needed.

The clauses followed a similar pattern. Companies could cut their workforces when times were tough or when they were closing past of their business, but redundancy had to be offered to everyone on the same terms, usually several weeks pay for each year of service. Otherwise, the rule was last-on, first off.

The law and practice in effect made it impossible for an employer to use redundancy as a means of getting rid of hopeless employees. Employers would have loved to have picked out a few drongos for redundancy while keeping the good staff. But in the union-dominated environment of redundancy-for-all, employers faced the prospect of the good people putting their hands up for redundancy because they could get jobs elsewhere while the otherwise unemployable drongos would hold their ground.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 27 January 2007 workplace”

Remember the early days of VCRs? Invariably, the only things worth watching on TV would come on consecutively on different channels on a night I had to go out.

After pressing buttons on the remotes for the VCR and TV according to the Japlish in the instruction booklets, I would go out hoping for the best.

Very often I came home to find just one or neither program was recorded. And I would mutter something like, “Oh gosh, I cannot watch the only thing worth watching because of the darned remotes.” Or words to that effect.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 20 January 2007”

British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli might have been right in the 19th century when he said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

More than a century on, however, the science of gathering statistics and our understanding of probability should put paid to Disraeli’s adage. The gathering of accurate statistics in modern times has been one of the greatest catalysts to improving people’s lives.

Australia is blessed with an independent body to gather statistics, the Australian Bureau of Statistics. We also have dozens of other agencies that gather them with similar objectivity and accuracy, such as traffic authorities and health and welfare agencies.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 13 January 2007 p”

Serendipity has been momentous in the cause of pure research. So often researchers looking for one thing stumble across another of much more practical significance.

Let loose a few researchers in pure fields and who knows what they might come up with – usually things of more value than directed research.

This is of great interest to journalists because the journalists’ task is to report and comment upon new things. So research that serendipitously spits out new findings of great practical importance is news.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 6 January 2007 juries”

When I was in primary school, there were no children of Catholic parents in my school. Those children went to a separate Catholic school.

We viewed them with fear and suspicion, fuelled by our parents’ prejudices. We chanted silly, insulting songs at about them in the street and they chanted them back.

Fortunately, it was at the tail end of widespread religious intolerance in Australia. By the late 1960s children of Catholic and Protestant mixed more freely. By the 1980s religious sectarianism was over. Before that religion could influence careers and economic advancement generally.

Australia was lucky that its economic position was generally so good that Catholics did not suffer the sustained economic or political repression that erupts into violence as in Northern Ireland.
Continue reading “forum for saturday 30 december 2006 iraq pay”

Police and fire authorities have been advising people facing fires this season to make a choice: either stay and defend or evacuate early. And having made your decision, stick to it.

It is advice that some Canberrans say they would have liked before the January 18 fires.

In past seasons, police have been known to order evacuations and in some states legislation has been passed to give them the power to arrest people to ensure they evacuate. The common-law position has always been that police have no power to arrest people without reasonable suspicion that they have committed an offence and that they have no power to enforce an order to evacuate private property.

The new position comes in light of more detailed research on the behaviour of fires. It now puts the decision on the home-owner, but a better-informed and better-prepared home-owner. Still it is an awesome choice.
Continue reading “forum for saturday 21 December 2006 decisions and fires”

The debates on Australian values and stem cell research this month have made it clearer where Prime Minister John Howard stands.

In voting against wider stem cell research he said, “To vote in favour of this bill is to embrace a relativist view of society and of the value of human life and what leads to it. This does, to use that cliche, get us perilously close to if not on to the slippery slope.”

He said also, “I think we live in an age where we have slid too far into relativism. There must be some absolutes in our society.”
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 16 December 2006 relativism”

It is now more dangerous for Australia not to have a Bill of Rights than to have one.

This week, a Bill of Rights came to the rescue in the US in a way that would not happen in Australia. A US court cited the Bill of Rights in striking down a Pennsylvania school board’s decision to order the unsubstantiated mumbo jumbo of “intelligent design” not be taught as part of the science course.

It is an appalling waste of students’ intellectual space to impose such “breathtaking inanity” — to use the judge’s words — upon young minds in the name of science.

US District Judge John Jones said, “Intelligent design . . . is a religious view, a mere re-labelling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.”

Jones, incidentally, is a Republican and a churchgoer.

The Pennsylvanian decision is a small advance in the face of considerable odds.

Bear in mind, it took the best part of 500 years for it to be (almost) universally accepted that earth is flat and not the centre of the universe. It has taken 500 years since Copernicus proved it that the vast bulk of humankind knows the earth goes around the the sun and that it is a sphere.
Continue reading “Forum for Saty 24 dec 2006 bill of rights”

Sometime in the late 1940s two High Court judges left the Sydney Town Hall after one of the ABC’s splendid “live” symphony concerts.

Justice George Rich thought the performance wonderful and turned around to Justice Owen Dixon and said, “Splendid concert, don’t you think?”

To which Dixon replied, citing the words of Section 51 of the Constitution, “Yes, indeed, but I cannot see the connection with ‘postal, telegraphic, telephonic, and other like services’.”

This has been the head of constitutional power that has enabled the Federal Parliament to regulate broadcasting.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 9 December 06 fairfax”