Crispin Hull

John Howard may well only retire after he has beaten Robert Menzies’ record (unless he is thrown out by people or party beforehand). But whenever he retires, I cannot imagine him doing what Menzies did shortly afterwards.

Menzies was invited by the University of Virginia to give seven lectures on Central Power in the Australian Commonwealth.

They show Menzies as a nation-builder rather than a mere exerciser of power for its own sake.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 12 August 2006 telstra”

In 1940 Adolf Hitler predicted that the aerial bombardment of British cities would result in the bulk of the population being “incited against the rich ruling class to bring about a revolution”. Britain would not be able to resist invasion after the bombing.

In 2006 the Israeli Government thought that bombing infrastructure used by Hezbollah in Lebanon in retaliation for Hezbollah’s kidnapping of Israeli soldiers would result in ordinary Lebanese people being so incited against Hezbollah that they would throw it out of the country.

Both were wrong, of course.

In 1940, one of the tasks my father had, as a clergyman in his early 20s, was to hold burial services for the body bits found on bomb sites in East London. Far from joining a revolution against the ruling classes, after the Blitz he enlisted in the Army.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 5 August 2006 bombing”

We have seen quite a lot of hand wringing over housing affordability this week. And there will be more next week if the Reserve Bank, against good sense, puts up interest rates.

Everyone is in on it. Social-welfare do-gooders want cheap housing for the poor; the housing industry wants more construction and more immigration to fuel it; the real estate industry wants more transactions. All have a point.

A two-day conference in Canberra looked at affordability (dreadful word) in the same week that the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey came out. It was fairly damning of Australia.

It seems bizarre that Australia with low population and high land mass should do so badly.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 29 July 2006 housing”

I needed/wanted a kitchen cupboard with pull-out drawers so you can see everything. It would put an end to buying a second, third or even fourth jar of mustard or mixed herbs or whatever because the earlier lot had disappeared in a jungle of jars, bottles and packets.

And so in the month of the publication of (ital) Not Buying It. My Year Without Shopping (end ital), I found myself at the Ikea store in Sydney.

Here was a more accurate glimpse of our times than the spikes and troughs of extreme and unusual events that occupy the pages of newspapers and the waves of the broadcast spectrum.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 22 July 2006 ikea”

Last week I sat before the most humungous television set I have seen in my life. It dominated a lounge room wall – like a cinema in the home.

As an experiment we flicked backwards and forwards between the standard-definition digital and the high-definition digital transmission.

Communications Minister Helen Coonan and Prime Minister John Howard might be able to discern a difference, but I couldn’t.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 15 July 2006 media changes”

It used to be those devilish socialists who wanted to concentrate power in Canberra so they could impose their Nanny-State-knows-best philosophy on the rest of us.

But this week a voice from the opposite political direction was calling for more central power.

Treasurer Peter Costello called for greater Commonwealth power over all key parts of the economy – infrastructure, especially ports, and tax.

Not since Gough Whitlam ran his ill-fated referendum to get Commonwealth power over prices and incomes has a federal leader (Costello sees himself as an economic leader) sought such sweeping powers for the Commonwealth.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 8 July 06 federalism”

In the past 10 years Australia has been a poor international citizen. Since 1996 Australia has thumbed its nose at any criticism of its human rights practices from abroad.

It has arrogantly paraded the view that human rights in Australia are second to none and everything is perfect.

This week it reaffirmed its commitment to detention without trial and with dodgy court procedures when it said, again, that it would do nothing to protest against the detention without trial of David Hicks. The reaffirmation came after the British Government said it was a matter for Australia because Hicks was an Australian when arrested (kidnapped?) by the Americans in Afghanistan five years ago, even though the British Courts have affirmed his right to take up British citizenship.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 1 July 2006 human rights”

Anybody out there that’s listening, tell your little ones that you love them every day because tomorrow they may not come home.”

Is this a parent talking from a war zone or after a natural disaster or some terrorist attack?

No. It is an Australian parent of an eight-year-old boy killed crossing a road with his 11-year-old sister. The girl is now in a critical condition in hospital.
Continue reading “forum extra media rules 1 july 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”