Crispin Hull

It was inevitable that the GST would end in tears before long, because the system was flawed in the first place.

This week, Treasurer Peter Costello called for greater accountability on how the states spend the GST revenue, and the states in turn told him to butt out.

The flaw in the GST system is that the Commonwealth was forced into a grave error at the time it was introduced. In order to get the GST legislation through the Senate, the Commonwealth agreed that all the revenue would go directly to the states to replace untied Commonwealth grants.

It was a foolish thing to do. It was one of the biggest shifts of power from the Commonwealth to the states in the history of our federation. No longer would the state premiers have to go cap in hand to the Commonwealth every year to argue for money.

Before 2001 the Premiers argued with the Commonwealth each year about how much in total would go to them. The Commonwealth Grants Commission would then apply a formula as to how the total would be divided among the states.

These days the total is guaranteed. Within three years of the GST’s introduction, the money going to the states outstripped the old grants (even allowing for inflation). GST revenues go up automatically with economic growth, or better. In its first year (2000-01) the GST was about 3.7 per cent of GDP. In 2003-04 it was be just over 4 per cent of GDP and in that time GDP has grown from $671 billion to $780 billion.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 5 march gst”

In 1969 the American radical writer Hunter S Thompson ran for the office of Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado.

Thompson was not a law-and-order man. Quite the opposite. He stood in protest after a crackdown by Aspen police and courts against hippie longhairs loitering on the footpath in the chic skiing and former mining town.

He was defending a choice of lifestyle. This week Thompson, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, took the ultimate lifestyle choice, putting a bullet through the roof of his mouth.

Thompson lost the election to the “round-‘em-up” incumbent, but the contest of ideas and values continues in Aspen and beyond. It is between liberals who want to conserve the town and the environment while allowing people to be free and easy, on one hand, and conservatives who want to restrict individuals being free and easy but wanting individuals to build whatever they want wherever they want it in the name of progress.

I have just returned from Aspen – addicted as I am to the white powder which is far too expensive for my income; ski lift tickets were an astonishing $95 a day.

The skifields, in fact, are part of this clash, or should I say race, between sensible economic activity which does not destroy the very base which provides the wealth, on one hand, and rabid short-term exploitation without regard to tomorrow, on the other.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 28 February 2005 aspen”

The cliché “leaves many questions unanswered” certainly applies to last week’s (week ending Feb 12) decision restoring $3.75 million to a man who was made a quadriplegic when he hit a sandbar when diving into the surf at Bondi beach.

The cliché is apt because the original decision was made by a jury. It was overturned by the NSW Court of Appeal and restored last week by the High Court.

A jury’s decision, of necessity, leaves many questions unanswered because juries do not give reasons for decisions.

You have to wonder why we persist with juries. Evidence that they approach their task with diligence, intelligence and reason is at best anecdotal. Most jurisdictions prevent disclosure of what goes on the jury-room, so we will never know.

Who knows, this jury might have thought, “Poor Guy Swain in a wheelchair and his poor parents having to look after him. Why not make the insurance company pay?”

Then again, the jury might have thought, “What negligence to put up flags near a sandbar. People are encouraged to swim between the flags, so they have a right to expect the sea there not to contain hazards that could have been spotted by those who placed the flags.”

Different jurors would probably have different reasons for their decision. Some might have consented to a majority view so they could get home early.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 20 February 2005 juries”

Prime Minister John Howard could well be secretly hoping Labor wins this month’s election in Western Australia.

While ever all the state and territory governments are Labor ones, Howard will get support for his centralist policies – most recently expressed in industrial relations and education.

It is a far cry from the Fraser years. Remember New Federalism under which the new Coalition Government would wind back the dangerous centralist socialist policies of the Whitlam Government. Since at least 1972 the Liberal Party has stood for states rights against the onslaught of centralism which it equated with socialism and meddling state control. It riled against Labor’s use of constitutional inventiveness like the expansion of the foreign-affairs power to enable the central government to get its way in fields such as the environment, discrimination law and unfair dismissal.

Now the Liberals have been in power in Canberra for nearly a decade, their tune has changed. Their earlier objection to centralism in principle has fallen away. They want to override the states and territories.

The Liberal Party itself is very much a creature of federalism. Its state bodies are independent. Its national organisation does not have anywhere near the policy-formulating powers of Labor’s national convention. Nor does it have the Labor Party’s system of “national intervention” when the state branches go awry.

Liberal Prime Ministers Robert Menzies and Malcolm Fraser were federalists. Howard, on the other hand, seems much more a centralist.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 12 feb 2005 federalism”

The US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was quite right to point out after the Iraqi election this week that democracy is not just a western value, but a universal one – one sought by people in the Arab world as well.

President George W Bush made a similar point in an address marking the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy. He said, “There are, however, essential principles common to every successful society, in every culture. Successful societies limit the power of the state and the power of the military — so that governments respond to the will of the people, and not the will of an elite. Successful societies protect freedom with the consistent and impartial rule of law, instead of selecting applying the law to punish political opponents.”

They are fine words. But Bush himself has not lived up to them. So it was a fine thing this week to see a US court ordering him to live up to them. A Federal Appeals Court in Washington DC ruled in favour of half a dozen detainees held by the US military at Guantanamo Bay.

Judge Joyce Green zeroed in on the need to limit the power of the state and the power of the military. She said the “President is not authorized to rule by fiat that an entire group of fighters has [few] legal rights”
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 3 Feb 2005 bill of rights”

There is nothing like a good war, of whatever sort, to test and highlight the importance of legal and constitutional values.

In the past week we have seen the acknowledgement by the United States that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that there are no grounds to prosecute Mamdouh Habib who had been held without charge or trial at the US Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba for three years.

The acknowledgement that there were no weapons of mass destruction came through the simple withdrawal of the US weapons inspection team from Iraq after it found nothing. As for Mr Habib, the US simply said there would be no charges and asked Australia to take him back. On both occasions, we are told, the intelligence was wrong. Or more likely its interpretation was wrong.

To misinterpret intelligence once is unfortunate; to misinterpret it twice looks like carelessness – indeed recklessness.

The two events are part of a shocking erosion of values in the US and Australia.

For get all the rabbitting on about so-called “core values” of family, “reading, writing and arithmetic”, extra marital sex, abortion, pornography, homosexuality, the gay mardi gras and the like.

There are much more important values – values that the United States was founded upon and values which liberal democratic societies like Australia have fought for. Essentially they are about the liberty of citizens which can only be assured through the rule of law.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday habib jan 15 2005”

The Liberal Party wants to remain the party of high taxation and high social security, judging by events of the past week.

A group of Coalition backbenchers has called for a reduction in the top marginal rate of tax and an increase in the tax-free threshold. The group argues that this could be done, given the Government will have a majority after July 1.

Finance Minister Nick Minchin immediately rejected the idea. Minchin said it was too easy to call for popular tax cuts without finding the equal (unpopular) spending cuts.

One of the oddities of the past two decades of Australian politics has been the way Labor delivered on the economic rationalist agenda and the Liberals maintained a semi-socialist outlook of higher taxation, higher public-sector spending and higher social welfare.

Labor reduced the top marginal tax rate from 66 per cent to 47 per cent. Labor began the privatisation push with the privatisation of the people’s bank. Labor deregulated the financial system and floated the currency. Labor cut Commonwealth revenue as a percentage of GDP, cut the Commonwealth Public Service and cut social security as a proportion of Commonwealth outlays.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 29 Jan 2005 tax cuts”

Paris has decided to take on one of the world’s silliest, most wasteful industries – bottled water.

This month it launched a campaign for people to drink tap water and to demand tap water at restaurants.

Paris city authorities think it is bizarre that they provide drinking water that is equal or better quality than bottled water, yet people are duped or lured into buying bottled water that costs between 250 and 3000 times as much per litre. They cite huge environmental costs of bottled water – the stuff has to be transported to retailers and the plastic bottles either end in landfill or go to costly recycling.

So they are taking on the bottled-water industry, using some of the industry’s own tactics – glamorous brand-name advertising. They have scrapped the name Sagep, which stands for Société Anonyme de Gestion des Eaux de Paris or Parisian Water Management Company Limited. In its place they have created the name Eau de Paris – sounds like a perfume.

Maybe the horribly acronymphomanic Actew should take note. Perhaps it should call its water Brindabella Blue or something similar.

The bottled-water industry is growing at around 10 per cent a year. Annual sales are at about $40 billion – about half the world foreign-aid contribution. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that 22 million tonnes of bottled water are transferred each year from country to country. Each year, 1.5 million tonnes of plastic are used, 90 per cent of which is not recycled.

Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 22 Jan 2005 water”

One of the most encouraging debates in Australia in 2004 was the one over reading.

I cannot recall another year when reading was the subject of so much discussion. It was an Olympic year; a year of wars and natural disasters and an election year nationally and locally.

It was astonishing that reading got such prominence. How well we read? How many of us cannot read? What role should government play in encouraging reading? How is reading taught? What do we read? Does it matter how well or what we read?

The question was politicised in 2004 in an unprecedented way. Opposition Leader Mark Latham, shortly after taking the leadership in December, 2003, made reading a major subject of his campaigning. He launched three reading policies: Bookstart, Read Aloud Australia and Read Aloud Ambassadors.

“This is a program to make more storybooks available to improve the literacy and reading capacity of all children in this country, to encourage parents to read to their children and to give them the opportunity to enjoy that great part of life,” Latham said.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 01 jan 1 2005 reading”

Political history has many examples of those in power seeking to rid themselves of inconvenient opposition.

Henry II cried in 1170: “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?”

Henry’s knights took the hint and it was goodbye Thomas A Beckett. Henry did not imagine they would murder A Beckett.

Henry VIII hacked off the heads of Thomas More and the occasional inconvenient wife, among others.

In later times the process became less bloody.

Prime Minister Robert Menzies appointed possible leadership aspirants Richard Casey and Percy Spender to diplomatic posts.
Continue reading “2004-11-november Forum for Saturday 27 november 2004 windsor”