Crispin Hull

The office of Finance Minister Senator Nick Minchin circulated a copy of speech on Wednesday night that was never delivered. The copy contained the suggestion that the Liberal Party and the National Party should merge. The speech was to a conference of the National Farmers Federation in Western Australia.

When news of the idea reached Prime Minister John Howard, on an official visit to China, he ordered that the offending parts of the speech not be delivered. Deputy Prime Minister and National Party leader John Anderson expressed his displeasure at the fact that Senator Minchin dared even think about putting the suggestion to the conference.

Senator Minchin’s written version of the the speech said, “”I do look forward to the day when we are one great Centre-Right party, uniting liberals, conservatices and believers in free enterprise.” It would mean that the merged party would hold 43 of the 63 rural and regional (non-urban) seats in the Parliament.
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In theory competition should bring prices down. It seems bizarre, therefore, that the Independent Competition and Regulatory Commission has recommended that the ACT Government allow full retail electricity competition in the ACT even though the commission acknowledges that the residential consumers would pay on average about $2 more per month for electricity.

The commission argues that if the ACT does not allow contestability, the ACT would lose competition payments from the Commonwealth. These payments are made under an agreement made in the 1990s between the states and territories on one hand and the Commonwealth on the other to gradually break down state held monopolies – mainly in utilities like electricity, water, gas, building approvals and so on. Unlike private sector companies, the state monopolies had largely escaped the requirements in force against monopolies since the mid-1970s. The privatisations and breaking down of monopolies have not been altogether successful. In Victoria, in particular, they have been met with higher prices and lower reliability. True, the prices might have gone up anyway and supply might have been more erratic anyway, but that is not the way consumers see it. They are more wont to look back to the “”good old days”.

There will be some political risk for the Government in accepting the commission’s advice, particularly as ActewAGL has been singularly successful in providing reliable supply – perhaps the most reliable in the country over the past decade – at low prices – at present 20 per cent below the national average. Moreover, ActewAGL has done this in the face of competition that was introduced in the commercial sector.
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Timor is at last free and independent — more than a quarter of a century after the bloody invasion by Indonesia which followed the sudden departure of the Portuguese colonial masters who has ruled the tiny territory for more than 400 years.

About a quarter of the population of just 800,000 lost their lives in that struggle. Now the struggle will be of a different kind – a peaceful struggle, but a difficult one nonetheless. It is the struggle for economic development – to ensure that health and education are available to the people of East Timor to they can reach their best potential.

Much has been made of the oil in the Timor sea. Under present arrangement Timor will get 90 per cent of the royalties and Australia will get 10 per cent. There has been some criticism of Australia on this ground, with a suggestion that all the royalties should go to Timor. This is a narrow view. If Australia is to get 10 per cent of the royalties, there will be incentive enough to see that more likely the extraction is properly run, with proper accounting, auditing and environmental standards. It will be better for East Timor to have 90 per cent of something than 100 per cent of nothing. Indeed, the oil might be more a curse than a blessing. Too often, developing nations with huge resources fail to develop or pass on the fruits of their resources to the people. Angola and Papua New Guinea are classic examples. The more resources, it seems, the more the power elite of the emerging country engage in corruption based upon the potential of those resources to lien their own pockets, rather than act to develop them responsibly in the interest of the nation as a whole. The potential for mismanagement, corruption and abuse of power in Timor is very high. From both a Timorese and Australian perspective, the hopes are that this will not happen. The Australian role in the Timor Gap oil must look beyond the 10 per cent Australian share as a source of wealth. It must be seen as a chance to ensure that the East Timorese get the opportunity to avoid the experience of other developing nations with big wealth in the ground and learn from the Australian experience (somewhat flawed as it is) of translating wealth in the ground to better living standards for the broad mass of people. It means concentrating of health, education, excellent public administration and sound political systems.
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Australia has a long and distinguished reputation on the bringing to justice of war criminals. Australia played a critical role in both the Nuremberg trials and trials of Japanese soldier charged with war crimes after World War II – the first of their kinds in history. At these trials, for the first time, it was not a revenge exercise by victors against vanquished, but a trial of people on objective evidence on charges that caused revulsion among people since civilisation began – genocide, mass murder and waging an aggressive war.

But until recently, war crimes tribunals have only been set up to deal with particular conflicts, most recently with respect to conflict in the former Yugoslavia. That step was a slightly greater step to universality in that it was set up under the United Nations to deal with criminals from both sides – whereas Nuremberg and the Japanese trials were set up by victors. Now, the international community is on the cusp of a new and welcome development – a permanent war crimes tribunal to deal even more universally with war crimes because it would be both international and have jurisdiction over crimes committed in any conflict anywhere.
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The Australian Labor Party and the Democrats are playing a dangerous and foolish game if they block the Government’s proposed $6.20 increase on the co-payment for prescription drugs.

The Democrats leader Senator Natasha Stott Despoja said, “”It is a national test of how we treat the most vulnerable in our community and if we pass the legislation that cuts PBS or DSP [disability support pensions] we will fail that test. That’s why the Australian Democrats will stop, will vote against this legislation in the Parliament.”
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The effective banning of the French film Baise Moi raises fundamental questions about the dignity and value of the individual and the farce of censorship.

The film was originally given a R rating – for over 18-year-olds, but after some complaints by an unspecified number of people the Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, ordered a review. The Classification Review Board changed the R rating to a refusal of classification on Friday after the film had been screened for a week. Refusal of classification is an effective ban because it is an offence to screen an unclassified film and various state offences relate to X ratings or refused ratings.

The film is described as explicit, nihilist, violent and feminist. It describes how two women go on a spree of sex and killing after one is raped and the other sees her best friend shot. It is not the sort of film that a large number of people would want to see, but others would like to whether for entertainment or to see it as art.
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ACT taverns have a reasonable argument that they should be allowed to have at least some poker machines. Their present allowance of only two class A machines amounts to a total ban because these machines are no longer available. The taverns want to a have a trial of two class-C (modern machines).

At present the 5200 machines allowed in the territory are restricted to clubs. The National Federal of Independent Businesses is threatening to take the matter to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission unless they get access to the machines. That threat would probably come to very little. Nonetheless the taverns have a moral argument, even if they do not have much of a legal one.
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The Federal Government should have been more cautious in its change to immigration policy. It has decided toincrease the intake by 12,000 to above the 100,000 mark for each of the next four years. The emphasis is to be on skilled immigration. Indeed, the program for people applying for permanent residency from within Australia as refugees has been cut from 5600 to 2000 though the humanitarian program overall will continue with the 12,000 places of each of the past five years.

The increase in the skilled program means that Australia’s population will be 27 million in 2050 instead of 25 million. Given the state of thingslike salinity, land-clearing, endagenred species and the like, the wisdom of the increase must be questioned. Moreover, as NSW Premier Bob Carr never tires of pointing out, the major burden of immigration is borne by Sydney, a city whose infrastructure is straining under population growth. Traffic problems, housing shortages and impossible prices and public transport stress suggest that increasing Sydney’s population will result in a poorer, not better standard of living.
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It is common practice for an incoming government to declare the cupboard was bare and that the previous government had hidden the grim truth about the state of government finances so it would not be possible for the new government to deliver all its promises and run a balanced or surplus budget.

The new ACT Labor Government was no different. Upon attaining government it immediately set about redrawing the fiscal landscape. It ordered a commission of audit to look at the books and determine the state of the ACT public account as at October 31.

Surprise, surprise, the commission of audit found the cupboard bare. Indeed, it found at $5 million deficit. This was a completely different picture from that painted by the Liberal Government as it went into the election. It said it was a responsible government that had maintained surpluses.
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The euphoria over the release from house arrest of Burma democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is understandable, but may be premature. The military, which has ruled Burma repressively for four decades, has not suddenly seen the light and decided that truth, justice and democracy are good things and that they should return to their barracks. Rather some of them appear to be driven by fear. The military is clearly split. Some would like to cling to power uncompromisingly. Others. Though, see that the combination of economic sanctions and the HIV epidemic is leading the nation to such an appalling state that it will not be worth ruling or not capable of being ruled as economic breakdown leads perhaps to revolution.

Perhaps they think that by releasing Ms Suu Kyi they will gain some concessions from the international community – particularly western democracies — in the form of a relaxation of economic sanctions. The west should not be so easily fooled. Western countries should wait for a more definite path to democracy and respect for human right to emerge before any sanctions are lifted.
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