Crispin Hull

As a journalist I have been watching two seemingly unrelated but alarming trends.

The first is that cars have been getting far more reliable these past 20 years. A 10-or 15-year-old car now is far more reliable than its counterpart a decade or so ago.

The second is a growing realisation that the young women who go into prostitution are most likely to be the victims of drug abuse, nasty pimps and immigration spivs.

So why is this so alarming?

Because journalists are now in danger of slipping below used car salesmen and prostitutes in the order of professions on the list of trustworthiness and respectability. That will put us very near the bottom.

Mercifully, nothing will drag us below real-estate agents, who will always describe as “a stone’s throw to the shops” a distance that Robert de Castella would find hard to cover in a hour, or who will describe a house crying for the bulldozer as a “handyman’s dream” or where “rustic” means Telstra will charge $6000 to put the phone on.

None the less, journalists will remain below professions like taxi drivers and bus drivers, even though I understand there is a now new mathematical theorem which suggests that the longest possible distance between any two given points is the ACTION bus route.

We are even below politicians.

Teachers are in the middle.
Continue reading “2004-10-october english as a second language”

The people of the ACT have given Chief Minister Jon Stanhope majority government.

Its cautious government over the past three years has resulted in voters not being concerned about handing Labor a majority.

A lot of last night’s victory is a personal victory for Stanhope. It is reflected in his high personal vote of 2.1 quotas.

The electorate has obviously thought that a majority Labor Government is a better proposition than a minority one relying on Green support. The prediction of Greens’ federal leader Bob Brown of three or four Green seats fell to dust.

So why did Stanhope do so well and the Greens and Democrats so badly?

Stanhope has brought a passion and conviction to the job. While his federal colleagues and Labor leaders in the states have concentrated almost solely on the economy, Stanhope went beyond that. He was not frightened to legislate and fund a strong agenda on human rights, indigenous people, gay rights, the environment to the like. With that agenda voters obviously thought the Democrats and Greens less necessary.
Continue reading “2004-10-october act election result”

Australian Capital Territory June 2004 March 2004 June 2003
Home Loan Affordability Indicator (HLAI) 46.2 48.1 54.9
Proportion of family income devoted to meeting average loan repayments 21.7% 20.8% 18.2%
Median weekly family income $1,767 $1,776 $1,749
Average monthly loan repayment $1,659 $1,601 $1,380
Average Loan $237,255 $228,929 $206,751
Total number of loans 1,366 1,385 1,969
Standard variable bank interest rate 6.98% 6.96% 6.50%
Bank fixed interest rate 6.97% 6.99% 6.04%
Quarterly median house price (Canberra) $361,500 $370,800 $305,000
Quarterly average vacancy rate (Canberra) 4.3% 3.6% 3.5%
Continue reading “2004-09-september table affordability”

No electoral system is perfect. Our federal system is fairly good, but it has two corrupting influences revealed in the past week or so: the marginal-seat effect and the Senate preference system.

Canberrans are perhaps the most disenfranchised group in a majority of disenfranchised people in this election. The result of the two House of Representatives seats in the ACT are a foregone conclusion. Electors in another 115 seats are in the same boat.

The election is only being fought in about 30 marginal seats. That is the way the electoral system works. But it is bad for public policy and unfair to the electors concerned.

Oh to be in the Darwin-based electorate of Solomon where just 88 votes would be enough for the Government member to lose. Those electors are the beneficiary of a $50 million promise by the Government to improve Darwin hospital (under the guise of providing an emergency hospital if there is another Bali attack).
Continue reading “2004-09-september saty forum 25 september 2004 voting system”

The property boom is over leaving frustrated first home buyers, governments over-dependant on property taxes and some people worrying how they will pay rates and land tax.

But of all the states and territories, the ACT is perhaps in the best position to cope, through good luck as much as good management. But it is not all beer and skittles in the ACT.

The AMP-Real Estate Institute of Australia Housing Loan Affordability Index for the June quarter was published this week. So were the Australian Bureau of Statistic June quarter figures for housing prices in the eight capitals.

Canberra fared badly in both of them. They show the property boom is well and truly over in Canberra and Sydney and most likely over elsewhere.

You would expect that as prices level or fall, affordability will improve. But right now it is not good. Affordability is now at its worst in the ACT since the index began in March 1995.

The index came out a few days after the brave words of Urban Services Minister Bill Wood that “the Stanhope Government is making considerable progress in addressing housing affordability in the ACT”.
Continue reading “2004-09-september Forum for Saturday housing affordability”

Only good luck has kept the ACT from going into the red right at the wrong time in the economic cycle.

Keeping the Budget in surplus has become almost a compulsory mantra for major parties at federal and territory level. But, in fact, the surpluses are tiny and they spend or promise right to the limit.

Some discipline is at least applied in the federal sphere where some 200 journalists and as many political staff members check the cost of all proposals and have running tallies of the totals. They ring alarm bells when the surplus is threatened.

Not so in the ACT, especially this election where so much journalistic and political effort has been diverted to the concurrent federal game.

By the middle of this week in the ACT both parties had blown the surplus of $7.9 million, on any sensible reckoning.

On health, Labor was throwing beds around like a salesman in a Harvey Norman showroom. It was dishing out money for women to go back to work and has promised $70 million extra in child protection “over the next few years”.
Continue reading “2004-09-september Forum for Saturday 18 sept act budget”

Howard surges to a winning position, the headline in The Sydney Morning Herald gushed on Tuesday.

The paper was reporting on the latest opinion poll that it had commissioned ACNielsen to do.

On the same day, The Australian reported on its Newspoll saying, “The first-week fear campaign on interest rates has lifted the Howard Government’s primary vote above the ALP.”

Well, maybe. Maybe not.

Both newspapers reported changes between their previous polls and the present one and drew their conclusions on a few percentage points of recorded change.

In the Sydney Morning Herald’s case, the “surge” was based on a three per cent increase in the Coalition’s two-party preferred vote and a four per cent increase in its primary vote. This was based on a sample size of 1415. The margin of error with such a sample size is a tad over 2.5 per cent either way. So if the polling was done 20 times you would expect the results to be within 2.5 per cent either way 19 times and one time beyond that range.

You could be 95 per cent confident that total population’s voting intention is within 2.5 per cent either way. But if you took 2.5 per cent from the Coalition and gave it to Labor, there would be no “surge” at all.
Continue reading “2004-09-september Forum for Saturday 11 Sept 2004 opinion po”

A majority of the High Court held that the Commonwealth Parliament could legislate for the indefinite detention of asylum seekers and that the Government could use that legislation to lock up indefinitely without trial or charge an alien who had not been granted a visa and could not be deported because no country would have them.

Several people are in that situation now. They have agreed to leave and want to leave, provided some country can be found to take them. None will, so the Government’s proposition is that the law allows them to be locked up indefinitely.

Four judges said present law did exactly that and the Constitution would not prevent it. Two other judges said there was some ambiguity with the present law, but if new unambiguous laws were enacted the Constitution would not prevent indefinite detention.

Only one judge, Justice Michael Kirby, said the Constitution would prevent indefinite detention without charge or trial.

Forget for the moment that the people being dealt with are refugees. Surely, it should be unacceptable to the Australian community that the Government could lawfully hold anyone in detention for the rest of their lives without charge or trial.
Continue reading “2004_08_august_oped detention”

Independent MLA Helen Cross has the laudable aim of reducing illness and death from exposure to asbestos.

To that end she proposes that whenever a dwelling is sold in the ACT an asbestos report be contained as part of the building report that sellers must give to potential buyers.

The Assembly very sensibly sent her Residential Property (Awareness of Asbestos) Bill off to a committee.

Who knows? A committee might recognise is as the Election Looming (Awareness of Independent Seeking Publicity) Bill.

Cross intends to rally some asbestos victims to the public galleries, including Bernie Banton, the asbestosis sufferer who attended the commission of inquiry into James Hardie Industries.

How easy it is to latch on to an emotional issue. The damage asbestos has done in Australia is horrific, and the attempt by James Hardie to evade responsibility is appalling. But that does not mean every proposal dreamt up by any politician has any merit or will do anything to help victims or prevent future cases.

Cross said, “If this Bill doesn’t go through, people could still be dying in 20 years’ time from asbestos-related diseases.” Well, if the Bill DOES go through, people could still be dying in 20 years’ time from asbestos-related diseases.
Continue reading “2004_08_august_forum for saty aug 21 asbestos”