Crispin Hull

It is almost exactly 40 years since my name appeared on Page 3 of Albury-Wodonga’s Border Morning Mail.

I was mentioned as one of those who suffered minor injuries in a road crash on the Wodonga-Beechworth road. It was a collision between a young, arrogant driver and an old, obstinate one. The old, obstinate driver died later of his injuries. I can still see the broken bone of the young, arrogant driver poking through the flesh of his forearm. He has since died of an unrelated illness. My brother and mother were in hospital for weeks with ghastly injuries.

I was reminded of the anniversary this week for several reasons.

It coincided with a dental appointment.

This week – in early May — ACT reached the same number dead on the road as for the whole of last year.

Research was published that effectively debunks the idea that the ACT has the best drivers in Australia because the ACT has the lowest toll per head by far.

And an enormous amount of publicity was given to a fatal air crash in Queensland.

The dental appointment was related. Yes, even 40 years later, the effect goes on. Sure, it is very minor stuff. The dentist was replacing a crown on a tooth that was shattered in the crash.

But for many it is not minor. Road crashes cause a lifetime of anguish, bereavement and suffering. And it is all so unnecessary.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 14 may 2005 road deaths”

The graceful retirement and handing over office to a younger person is behaviour rarely seen in politics.

Treasurer Peter Costello should look into the history books (and indeed watch a few David Attenborough documentaries) to realise that he will have to fight to get the Prime Ministership from John Howard.

Australia has 25 Prime Ministers. Four were caretaker Prime Ministers for a few days while the major party elected a new leader. One is still in office. What was the fate of the others?

Essentially, they get beaten by the people, their own party or they die in office. They rarely resign to hand over to a younger person. They rarely quit while they are ahead.

The people threw out: Keating, Fraser, Whitlam, McMahon, Chifley, Scullin, Bruce (who also lost his own seat), Cook and Deakin.

It seems unlikely now that Howard would be beaten by the people, but a year or two is a very long time in politics and the public is fickle.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 7 may PMs do not quit”

Did we really need the Productivity Commission to tell us that the energy efficiency ratings are a waste of time and money?

A week ago it suggested we might have wasted $12 million on EERs in the past five years.

It is another reminder of how badly Canberra has done on planning since self-government.

Other reminders are:

The despairingly slow progress at rebuilding after the 2003 bushfires. True, much delay has been because of insurance, but planning has been a major frustration. When these suburbs were built 30 years ago people had to finish building within a year, as a condition of their lease. Two years after the fires only a third of the 491 houses had been rebuilt.

The rotten state of Civic as highlighted by John Thistleton and Ben Doherty’s reports in The Canberra Times this week.

Planning Minister Simon Corbell’s side-flip on Civic. His enthusiasm for relaxed rules for West Civic resulted in people from other parts of Civic saying, “Why can’t we have relaxed rules, too?” Why not, indeed, the Minister said. He should have thought of it first up.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 30 april 2005 planning”

Governments so often get revenue and spending measures wrong.

There were another couple of examples in the past week. The Medicare safety net was a classic.

The net was set at $300 for low-income earners and $700 for others. Beyond that the Government would pay 80 cents in the dollar of all medical expenses.

It was to cost $440 million. But the forward estimates quickly blew to $1 billion. How could a government armed with the best financial advice get it so wrong?

The fundamental problem seems to be that governments assume that existing behaviour will continue after a new financial measure is introduced. It is rarely the case, though.

People enjoy government hand-outs – so they will change their behaviour to take advantage of them. People do not like taxation – so they will change their behaviour to avoid it.

If people had not changed their behaviour, the new safety net would have cost $440 million. But they did not. Doctors rubbed their hands in glee. If the Government was picking up the tab, why not charge the patient more?

And patients, meanwhile, thought that if the Government was picking up the tab, why not go for that elective surgery right now.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 23 april 2005 tax”

Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said this week that he would have informal meetings with candidates to replace High Court Justice Michael McHugh who turns 70 in November and must retire under constitutional amendment of 1977.

Ruddock would do well to heed the words of McHugh himself, but I do not imagine he will.

At a dinner to welcome new senior counsel to the High Court earlier this year McHugh bemoaned the fact that there was no female member of the High Court bench and that Justice Mary Gaudron, who retired in 2003, was the only female judge in the court’s 100 year history.

He warned that “the legitimacy of the judiciary rests upon the support and confidence of the Australian people. The continued failure to appoint a qualified female to our highest court runs the risk of slowly eroding that support. Over time a court that does not reflect the diversity of society at large, that is denied the potentially distinctive perspective that a female Justice may bring to the law and that is socially and culturally homogenous in its male membership may not retain public confidence.”

Ruddock, by law, has to consult the state and territory attorneys-general, but he does not have to take any notice of them – particularly if they are of different political persuasion.

Unlike the US, there is no confirmation hearing for court appointees in the Senate. The Government’s word is first and last.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 16 apr 2005 high court vacancy”

The difference between a rented house and an owned one is usually obvious. Owners take greater care. They improve and maintain. The difference between a house rented by a couple and a group house is perhaps more profound. The latter frequently descends into a slum as each occupant can blame another. Moreover, with each occupant having less ownership there is less incentive to improve, clean and maintain.

Alas, that has often been the case with native title. Communal title seems wonderful, but defies human nature. It might work in the face of adversity when the community gets together to survive. But when the basics are met, it holds back economic progress. Communal title in Soviet Bloc countries, for example, failed.

Native title in Australia has got some major drawbacks – most significantly, the land cannot be mortgaged. So where does anyone get the money to build their own home or start a business?

The proposal this week for changes to the way Indigenous people hold land in the Northern Territory would change that.

Warren Mundine, a member of the Prime Minister’s National Indigenous Council, called for a system of 99-year leases – similar to ACT tenure – for individuals on what is now communally owned land.

It seems to me that nothing in this proposal contradicts the fundamentals of native title. The experience I had in 1993 on Mer (or Murray Island) where the Mabo case began shows this sort of title is more in keeping with the native title described in the Mabo than the communally held land on the mainland. More of that anon.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 9 april 2005 native title”

The chair of the parliamentary committee on electoral matters, Tony Smith, wants a referendum on the frequency of elections.

Smith is a Victorian Liberal. That and his committee chairmanship give his views some weight. But four-year terms have a lot of difficulty. The question highlights some flaws in our Constitution which arise out of its mixed British and American heritage.

“We should update our democracy to ensure it is operating as effectively and efficiently as possible,” Smith said this week. “Four years would give more time for governing and policy making. The short three-year terms add to the cost of elections, frustrate the public, do not give certainty to the business community and act as a bit of a handbrake on business decisions.”

Smith wants a referendum at the next election, expected in 2007, with the change taking effect after the following election in 2010.

The snags are whether the term should be fixed, and what to do about the Senate.

At present, senators have fixed six-year terms. Half the senators are elected at each House of Representatives election and take office on July 1 after the election. Their term ends on June 30 six years later. The fixed term has its roots in the US Constitution.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 2 April 2005 fixed terms”

At least there are some issues where Australia and the Howard Government do not slavishly follow the United States.

In the US this past week, yet another heavily armed civilian went on a random-shooting spree killing many innocent bystanders – depriving them of their right to life.

The US Congress has done virtually nothing in the past two decades to prevent these killings. It passed some minor restrictions on guns after President Ronald Reagan was shot an injured in 1981.

Yet this same week Congress was specially recalled in a weekend sitting and passed special legislation which was signed immediately into law by President George W Bush. The legislation was aimed at forcibly keeping alive Terri Schiavo, who lies in a vegetative state in a hospital in Florida.

The Bush Administration and other religious extremists in the US show bizarre contradictions about the right to life. They spend all their efforts on the unborn and nearly dead, while other policies are an affront to the lives of the healthy living.

More than 1500 US servicemen and thousands of others have been killed in Iraq – a war prosecuted prematurely and without UN sanction. If the preservation of life were your belief, surely you would exhaust all other options before committing to war.

More than one person a week is executed in the US – nearly half in George Bush’s state of Texas. Some are innocent. The vast majority are guilty of terrible crimes, but if the preservation of life is your belief, why not find some other punishment?

More than 30,000 people a year die by firearms in the US. About 12,000 are homicides; 1000 accidents; and 17,000 suicides.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 26 march 2005 artifical feeding”

My first trip to Canberra was the result of an arithmetic error, of sorts.

It was in 1964 or 1965.

I recall the incident now after the blunder in last week’s column when I wrote that the naming of Canberra took place 82, rather than 92 years ago. Indeed, I sat bolt upright in the middle of the night – early Friday morning to be precise — realising the blunder. I dashed to the computer and penned an email to the editor of the Forum pages stating that arithmetic was not my strong suit and attached an amended version.

But silly me. I had corrected the Word file but failed to save the changes before attaching it to the email. The 82 years was duly published.

Normally, one would expect a cascade of nyahdy nyahdy nyahnadies. But the object or my tirade on this occasion was Bob McMullan, long-time Federal representative of the ACT in the Senate and the House – a man more keen on dealing with the merits of the argument than some trivial arithmetic error.

I would never have come to Canberra but for a similar error.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 19 march”

Eighty-three years ago today (March 12), Lady Denman, wife of the Governor-General of Australia, officially named Canberra and unveiled the foundation stone in what is now the parliamentary triangle.

From the very start, bureaucrats and politicians attempted to stultify vision with concerns of commerce and cost.

In 1911 an international design competition for the new national capital was won by Walter Burley Griffin. It was inspired by the American cities beautiful movement – a highly idealistic group which sought, through human ingenuity of design, to create better places for humans to live. It sought practical, efficient, beautiful and satisfactory places to live, as opposed to the uncontrolled chaotic urban sprawl resulting from industrialisation.

Finish and French entries came second and third. King O’Malley, the Member of Parliament placed in charge of the competition, referred all three placegetter’s designs to a departmental board which came up with a hotch-potch combination of the entries.

A change in government fortunately saved us from this spoilt-brooth approach to town planning.

In the intervening 83 years the tension between the intelligent ideal and idiotic immediacy has never ceased. Indeed, it has become more vociferous since self-government in 1989.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 12 march 2005 nca”