Crispin Hull

It seems astonishing, from an Australian point of view, that there is so much talk in Britain about the resignation of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Also from an Australian perspective, it is astounding that Blair has got himself into such a hole over the two matters that are now dogging him: the Hutton inquiry and university fees. Politics may be similar everywhere; but it is not the same. It is difficult to see this happening in Australia.

The media is full of the possibility of Blair’s demise. It is mentioned at social gatherings. It arises in House of Commons debates.

This is despite the fact that Labour has a thumping majority in the House of Commons (408 seats of 659) and that Blair is a dominating political figure on the world stage.

Blair himself has even mentioned the R word. He has said he would resign if the inquiry by former Law Lord Brian Hutton into the suicide of weapons scientist Dr David Kelly found that he had lied in insisting that he had not authorised the leaking of Kelly’s name.
Continue reading “2004_01_january_saty forum blair”

On my reckoning, about half a tonne of booze was unnecessarily loaded on to JAL flight 403 from Tokyo to London just before Christmas.

The flight was chockers – 350 passengers and crew. Each had a litre or more of booze on average, weighing with glass and paper wrapping perhaps one and a third kilos. Most of it was produced in the British Isles – scotch and gin, the duty-free staples. So it was going back there, unopened. Much of it was bought earlier in Sydney because the Tokyo-London flight was the second leg of a now-popular Sydney-London route. So the booze has gone half way round the world and back again.

Why should this anachronism continue?

The duty free regime originally allowed people on ships to take on shore bottles bought on board. Often duty had been paid elsewhere. Often the bottles were opened and the contents half-drunk. So originally it was a reasonable convenience for travellers. The schemes expanded to include goods bought overseas, so that individual passengers were not hit with duty on single items such as electronic goods when the duty was designed to hit large importers as an industry-protection measure.

These days, protection duties are on the way out. Duties, particularly the GST and tobacco and alcohol excises – are designed to raise revenue or to discourage certain conduct. There is no rationale to let one class of people – travellers – avoid them, while others – stay-at-homes – have to pay them.
Continue reading “2003_12_december_satyy forum duty free”

Kim Dalton, the head of the Australian Film Commission, was interviewed on ABC 666 Radio last week.

Fowler, Gowers and Don Watson would have wept. It was a masterful performance of bureaucratic language. I’ll come to it below.

The commission is to merge with Screensound, the neologism for what we used to know by the more sensible name, the Australian Film and Sound Archive.

Any organisation that changes its names from the Australian Film and Sound Archive (a name which tells anyone precisely what the organisation is) to Screensound (a fatuous meaningless concoction) deserves punishment.

The punishment should have been for its managers to hang their heads in shame for a week for bowing to faddism, and they should have been ordered to change the name back to the sensible original. The punishment should not have been the organisation’s dismemberment.

But my argument here is not so much about the fate of the Australian Film and Sound Archive as about the language which accompanied the attempted hatchet job.

Why don’t they say what they mean? Why don’t they simply say: We propose to chop away part of the archive in Canberra? We propose to move the management of the collecting of archival material to Sydney and Melbourne. We propose that most of the dealings between the archive and the public will be moved to Sydney and Melbourne. Some people now working in Canberra will have to move or lose their jobs. We think that the action is in Sydney and Melbourne, so there.
Continue reading “2003_12_december_saty forum language”

This week saw yet another erosion of “states’ rights” — yet another lock of hair being removed by the federal Delilah from the Sampson states’ hair. But it is unlikely to result in the collapse of the whole temple.

This week the National Competition Council told the states that they have had enough time to get their houses in order. More precisely, the council reported to the federal Treasurer the detail of the states’ failings in competition policy and recommended the withholding of money from them according to the level of failing.

NSW Premier Bob Carr immediately branded the Treasurer’s acceptance of the recommendations as “fines”. He squealed loudly that NSW was being “fined” $50 million for not falling into line with federal wishes on liquor trading. He painted a picture of drunken ruffians being able to get liquor where and when they like under a federally dictated scheme. But because he could not afford to lose the $50 million that the NSW was “entitled” to, he would be forced to legislate to allow booze to be sold anywhere, anytime. The Feds would be responsible for the increased crime and violence.

It was high-level grandstanding.

There are no fines. There are no entitlements.

Competition policy does not work like that.
Continue reading “2003_12_december_forum for saturday competition”

Don’t expect to see the so-called generational change at federal level trickle down locally.

All major-party sitting MLAs are standing again. Some deferentially say that they are standing for pre-selection again, but in this environment it is the same thing. (Incidentally, is it only in English-speaking countries that one stands for a seat?)

Anyway Labor’s Bill Wood, aged 68, and Ted Quinlan and Wayne Berry, both 61, and the Liberals’ Greg Cornwell 65 will all stand again, though Cornwell’s official position is that it is unnecessary to decide until nominations for pre-selection close. Come the end of the next term the four will be 73, 66, 66 and 71 respectively.

But in the ACT context I’m not sure age is as important as attitude and drive. Maybe this is a harbinger. In an aging population we will soon have a quarter of the population over 65, so we should expect to have a quarter of or MLAs over 65. Generational change for its own sake is not as important as change directed at making the plant thrive. And in the plant that is the ACT polity we might have some old dead wood, but we have also got a fair bit of young dead wood, too. We should not worry about the ages of MLAs but what they are (not) doing.
Continue reading “2003_12_december_forum for saturday act after the poll”

In October 2001 Prime Minister John Howard said at the launch of his re-election campaign, “We decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”

He instilled fear in the hearts and minds of part of the Australian electorate and won the election.

That statement, though, invites two questions. Who are “we” and what is “this country”? The meaning of both has changed since 2001.

“This country” used to mean Australia with all of its islands. But in our brave new Alice in Wonderland world the word “Australia” means just what John Howard chooses it to mean — neither more or less. And in this instance slightly less than we all thought.

For the purposes of the Migration Act, suddenly islands are being excised from Australia. It is a legalistic way for Australia to worm out of its international agreements on refugees.

Under those agreements Australia has a duty to treat refugees who arrive in Australia in a certain way — not to return them to countries where they might be persecuted and to accord them basic living requirements (even if in detention) and a right to protection while their homelands are in turmoil. The Migration Act gives them a right to apply for a visa and the High Court can supervise the way that law is administered.
Continue reading “2003_11_november_stay forum excision”

The money has to come from somewhere — to fund health, education, police and roads.

This was Chief Minister Jon’s Stanhope’s riposte to Opposition Leader Brendan Smyth’s tirade about stamp duty going up by 67 per cent under the Stanhope Government.

Stanhope is right about the need to tax, but when he said the ACT had a narrow tax base hence the high stamp duty rates, he was slightly off the mark. True, the ACT has a narrower base than other states and territories because there is less industry here and one of our main industries – federal administration – enjoys an almost tax-free status. But the states and territories no longer can whinge that they have a narrow tax base now that the GST is in force. The $35 billion GST revenues go entirely to the states, under GST law. It is a very broad-based tax. It is imposed at 10 per cent on roughly half of Australia’s wealth generation. (It raises $35 billion which is 10 per cent of half of Australia’s total $700 billion GDP.)

The original GST plan was for greater income tax cuts and the abolition of various state duties, including stamp duty. But the Democrats watered it down. Once food was exempt, the income tax cuts were diluted and the states and territories kept many of their duties.
Continue reading “2003_11_november_forum for saturday taxes”

Something about the ACT Senate seats attracts hopeful, high-profile independent and minor-party candidates like bogongs to the light on the hill.

This week the hitherto electorally successful ACT Greens MLA Kerrie Tucker announced she would not be standing for a fourth term in the ACT Legislative Assembly and would consider standing for the Senate.

She would be wasting her time.

The two Senate seats in each of the mainland territories have been stitched up by the major parties. The system is deliberately arranged so that each major party gets one Senate seat each in the ACT and the Northern Territory and no-one has ever comes remotely within range of changing that outcome.

Former Prime Minister John Gorton, Tasmanian Democrat Senator Norm Saunders and Democrat former Farmers Federation chief Rick Farley are among the victims of the lure of the ACT Senate seat. None got within cooee.
Continue reading “2003_11_november_forum for saturday kerrie tucker”

The judiciary in Australia has come under heavy attack on several occasions in the past two decades or so for what is called judicial activism, or judicial adventurism.

This week the High Court’s second-longest serving justice, Michael Kirby, explained the need for restrained judicial activism in a series of lectures he was invited to give in England.

The attacks of judicial activism in Australia came in several sweeps. First, state premiers were incensed that the High Court allowed the Commonwealth’s foreign-affairs power to strike down state laws and interfere in what they saw a state matters.

Then Ministers in the Keating Government were incensed at the High Court. The court struck down Labor’s attempted prohibition of political broadcasting on the ground that it was offended an implied right of freedom of political communication in the Constitution. Then it struck out a Labor Member’s defamation action on the ground that the Constitution protected political communication. Some called for the appointment of black-letter lawyers to the Bench to prevent this judicial activism.
Continue reading “2003_11_november_forum for saturday judicial activism”

At first the barracuda were at the top of the food chain. They were pointing into the current waiting for some small fish to get swept passed into their jaws.

I was under them trying to get a backlit photo.

Then came the danger time. The barracuda – about a thousand of them – started to form a protective circle. They were no longer at to the top of the food chain. There were sharks below.

The barracuda form a circle so that together they get a 360-degree view. If two thousand fish-eye lenses are watching for a shark to attack, the whole group gets the advantage of an earlier warning.

They were so elegant. They were mesmerising.

Again came the danger time. This time for me. No; not the shark. Sharks are too smart to attack two metres of bubble-blowing creature. That presents unknown danger to them. (If only they knew how vulnerable we divers really are!)

No; the danger was being so preoccupied in this deep-blue display of nature that the current might take me either away or down or that I might be concentrating so much on taking pictures that I would forget to check my depth gauge and spend too long, too deep for safety, or worse rise too quickly allowing dangerous nitrogen to bubble in the blood. It is like bubbles in a softdrink bottle forming when the lid is taken off releasing the pressure. Little bubbles can stop blood flowing to precious parts of the lungs, brain and joints and can cause tiny blood vessels to burst.
Continue reading “2003_10_october_png travel”