Crispin Hull

Business put its hand up for big tax cuts this week.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s blueprint for reform contains some principles and objectives of taxation policy. They were not much different from those laid out by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations 230 years ago.

Smith said citizens should contribute towards the support of the government in proportion to their ability to pay. Tax ought to be certain, and the time, manner and quantity ought to be clear and plain. Tax ought to be levied at the time and manner in which it is most likely to be convenient for the contributor to pay it.

Most importantly, he wrote, “Every tax ought to be so contrived as both to take out and keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the State.” In other words, no costly tax bureaucracies.

The ACCI principles call for similar things: fairness, efficiency, clarity and simplicity.

The ideals are obvious, but their achievement seems impossible. There are several major difficulties.
Continue reading “2004-11-november Forum for Saturday 20 nov 2004 tax”

This week’s debate over reading should have been over long ago. We should rather be starting to fix the mess.

For the past couple of years I have been teaching part-time in journalism at the University of Canberra.

This is not going to be a whinge about “young people today”. To the contrary, I found all but one or two students among the hundred or so I taught to be enthusiastic, attentive and willing to learn.

But precious few had any idea how to punctuate. They put commas where they should have put a full stop, or even a new paragraph. They reserved colons for descriptions of the digestive tract. When I explained hyphenation of compound adjectives or the use of the perfect tense for reported speech, they thought I was teaching Swahili.

Their spelling was generally good – because they corrected every misspelled word not found in Microsoft Word’s dictionary. They spelt inoculation with one n and accommodation with two m’s and so on.

But they tripped so often over homophones. When I told them so, they thought I was talking about a gay man on a mobile. I was under threat of being dobbed into the discrimination Nazis until I patiently explained. They confused “hear” and “here”, “there” and “their”, “your” and “you’re”, and so on.
Continue reading “2004-11-november Forum for Saturday 13 Nov 2004 reading”

It is more than a quarter of a century since the Australian Law Reform Commission embarked on the quest to reform and unify Australia’s eight state and territory defamation laws.

And here we go again. Last week the eight state and territory attorneys-general agreed to draft legislation put by NSW. They only did so because they had been prodded into action by the Federal Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock.

Ruddock quite rightly points out the absurdity of have eight different laws applying to media that broadcasts over or circulates in several states.

That madness was highlighted in 1973 when Justice Russell Fox of the ACT Supreme delivered his judgment in the defamation action brought by Prime Minister John Gorton against the ABC and journalist Maximillian Walsh.

It was over a fleeting comment on an Australia-wide current affairs program that suggested Gorton had ordered a denial to be issued to a story he knew to be true in order to discredit his Defence Minister, Malcolm Fraser.
Continue reading “2004-11-november defo law reform 8 nov”

Majorities everywhere. The Republicans in the US have the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Liberals in Australia have Kirribilli House (sorry, The Lodge), the House of Representatives and the Senate. And Labor has a majority in the single house of the Act Parliament.

In declaring victory after his majority, George W Bush mentioned the Constitution. But the Australian Constitution did not figure in John Howard’s declaration.

Democrats in America can take some solace that the US Constitution with its Bill of Rights will ameliorate the excesses of the majority. The Australian Constitution is less robust. It does not have the same guarantees of individual rights, nor the checks and balances between the several arms of government. It used to provide at least some restraints against excessive use of power by the Federal Government by enforcing a stricter view of federal powers, but it is now too easy to get around that.

We have seen the flexing of the majority muscle in the past fortnight in Australia. Selling Telstra and exempting small business from unfair dismissal laws are fair enough; they were mentioned in the election campaign and have been Liberal policy for a long time.

But no-one mentioned abortion or the Federal Government taking over the universities and public hospitals in the campaign. Wholesale changes to industrial relations were not flagged. And the fairly restrictive national defamation law hardly got a mention.
Continue reading “2004_11_november Forum for Saturday 6 november majorities”

The cry of where is the money coming has gone up.

Labor says the Liberals have promised $542 million ($800 million on another estimate) over four years, blowing any hope of a Budget surplus. The Liberals say it is much less and they can get a surplus.

The problem for the Liberals is that they have not fully factored in the running costs of their promised new health facilitities. Their Ministers have also gone through the campaign promising things with attaching costs: mounted police (horses and bicycles), per-student private school funding, payroll tax relief, Gungahlin Drive to be dual carriageway and so on.

Under Liberal calculations, though, they can stay in surplus because they come off the 2004-05 result in the pre-election Treasury update, without factoring in all the the projected new programs and projects over the subsequent three years which are laid out in the Budget papers for 2004-05.

The trouble with that is, they have not said which of the already projected programs and projects will get the chop. That would be electorally unpopular.
Continue reading “2004-10-october optional break-out for oped”

Labor got a swing towards it in the ACT in Saturday’s federal election.

If its primary vote last Saturday translates to the election for the ACT Legislative Assembly this Saturday, Stanhope Labor could expect majority government with 10 of 17 seats.

But it ain’t gunna happen, for several reasons.

First, a lot of Canberrans vote for federal Labor for the purely selfish reason that they a federal public servants whose power and pay, they think, is improved by a federal Labor Government. But when it comes to local government get as fretful as the rest of Australia, especially over rates – the local equivalent of interest rates.

Secondly, in the ACT we have multi-member electorates: five members in the Belconnen-based Ginninderrra; five in the Tuggeranong-based seat of Brindabella and seven in the central seat of Molonglo. So we have a name-recognition factor plus a “my-local-member-helped-me” factor. It means quite a few people will have both Labor and Liberal candidates in their first five or seven preferences. In Molonglo in 2001, 8 per cent of the preferences of the first excluded Liberal went to Labor.
Continue reading “2004-10-october oped for wed oct 13 act elections”

Prime Minister John Howard is quite right: Australia has a strong economy.

Australia is a rich country and it is getting richer.

He is also right in saying that only when the economy is strong can you do important things like health care and education.

But there it stops.

Whoever wins, on Sunday morning it would be a good time to reflect on what sort of people and country we are.

In this election campaign we have heard too much self-delusion about the Australian character: compassionate, generous and tolerant.

The campaign is evidence to the contrary. The major parties base their policies on polling. Good representative samples tell the internal party pollsters what voters want and the parties respond.

What a merciless, mean, intolerant lot we are.
Continue reading “2004-10-october Forum for Saturday 9 october”

The kerfuffle over the Sunday Canberra Times putting Chief Minister Jon Stanhope’s head on a doctor’s body was an insignificant sideshow about a small picture.

The main show, with still no clear view of the big picture, is the 2003 bushfires.

As soon the coroner got close to getting a clearer picture, they want to shut her down. This week, nine ACT officials joined by the ACT Government successfully moved in the ACT Supreme Court to stop the inquest into the fires until the court determines whether the coroner Maria Doogan should be excluded on the grounds of perceived bias.

Doogan was moving beyond the hand-wringing and woe over a natural disaster. She was moving beyond the applause for the brave firefighters risking their lives. She was moving beyond the self-congratulatory praise over the response AFTER the event.

She was getting close to the real questions. Yes, it was a natural disaster and not much anyone could do about halting the firestorm that hit on January 18, 2003. But who was in a position to warn the residents on the perimeter of the city that a fire might hit? When were they in that position? And why didn’t they issue the warning before it was too late?

The residents might have had to abandon their homes anyway, but at least they would have had a chance to rescue their sentimental valuables. At least they would have been given a choice to prepare their homes for fire so there was less chance of them being consumed by flames. And maybe they would have had the chance to stay and fight.
Continue reading “2004-10-october Forum for Saturday 30 october 2004 bushfires”

Labor’s mauling of the Liberal Party on Saturday would have had more profound consequences if it had not been for the Hare-Clark voting system.

If there had been a single-member system, like the House of Representatives, Labor would have won every single seat in the ACT Parliament – all 17 of them.

The Hare-Clark system came in for a bit of sneering on election night. It was referred to as the “complicated” Hare-Clark system, the system that no-one understood and so on.

Well, even the most die-hard Labor supporter should be grateful for it.

Without it, there would be no Opposition in the Parliament – unless Labor decided to split into factions, with the Labor Left asking the Labor Right questions at Question Time. Or vice versa given that Labor’s left looks like picking up more seats than the Right (and perhaps the Centre as well).

The booth-by-booth results, as published by the ACT Electoral Commission with more than 90 per cent of the vote counted, show that Labor won 75 of the ACT’s 83 polling places, most of them very comfortably. The vast majority of people vote at the polling booth closest to their residence and so it is a fair assumption that votes in a single-member system would follow the booth-by-booth vote.

In Ginninderra, Labor won every booth except the tiny booth of Hall.
Continue reading “2004-10-october Forum for Saturday 23 october 2004 electoral”

Suddenly, Federal politics is no longer about health and education, but communications and industrial relations.

So now is the time for the Democrats to keep the bastards honest. Yes; the poor benighted Democrats who have just three years left to make themselves useful.

Australia is facing a Coalition majority in the Senate in July next year, when the senators elected on Saturday take their place. Worse, the Coalition could be one short of a majority and will have to rely on the Family First senator who could extract all sorts of unmandated concessions as a price of implementing Coalition policy.

We could see the Privatisation of Telstra and Prohibition of Stem Cell Research Act 2005 or the Small Business Can Sack Anyone and Sunday Shop Closure Act 2005 or the Packer and Murdoch Can Own the Lot and Medicare Will Not Fund Abortions Act 2005 and so on.

The Coalition and the Democrats have a comfortable majority in the present Senate with 42 senators. The Democrats’ role in life has been to ensure that governments stick to their mandate and to tone down some of the excesses. It has not been to block mindlessly.
Continue reading “2004-10-october Forum for Saturday 16 October 2004 democrats”