Crispin Hull

Labor frontbencher Mark Latham has proposed an ownership revolution with a plan to widen the employee share ownership scheme and a subsidy scheme for first-share buyers. Mr Latham who is assistant treasury spokesman said he wanted to draw on the ideals the compulsory superannuation scheme that was launched in the period of the Hawke-Keating Governments. That scheme had spread the wealth-generation of superannuation from just the well-to-do to the whole community. His leader, Simon Crean, said that many people were now gaining wealth not just through personal exertion and income but through assets. “”We want to spread that asset class to the whole population.

Mr Latham warned that Labor had to modernise or perish. It had to be relevant to a new class of aspirational voters. “”We must meet the legitimate aspirations of working Australians for asset accumulation. It is possible to achieve ownership for all.”
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The bickering between the Territory and the Commonwealth over the sale of a parcel of Commonwealth land in Tuggeranong is not helpful to orderly planning in the ACT. Nor is it helpful to ACT businesses, particularly those in Tuggeranong who had no warning that such a large parcel – 53,500 square metres or the size of 80 suburban housing blocks – would come on the market. The land comes on the market outside the ordinary planning context of the city. Buyers lining up at the auction will have no idea as to what use might ultimately be permitted by the Territory Government.

The Commonwealth is technically and legally correct in asserting the power to sell. The land was national land at the time of self-government, but the Commonwealth has no long-term use for it. The ordinary meaning of the self-government legislation should mean that the land would revert to Territory control, because national land is land that the Commonwealth is using or intends to use. But the legal meaning “”use” also means to sell.
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Edward VII took the throne at the age of 59 on his mother’s death in January 1901. He was on the throne for just nine years before his death at the age of 68 in 1910. That is the fate of the son of a long-living mother. Edward VII’s mother was Queen Victoria who reigned from 1837 to 1901, the longest reign in English history.

The present Queen is celebrating 50 years on the throne. Her son, Charles in now 53. It may well be that he shares the fate of Edward VII. He might, indeed, share the fate of the Black Prince, who in the 14th century died before his long reigning father, Edward III, the only other monarch to rule for more than 50 years – from 1327 (when he was just 17) to 1377.
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The Premier of NSW, Bob Carr, is on a dangerous path in changing the law of negligence by legislation to make it more difficult for people to sue for damages for personal injury caused by medical negligence as he suggested this week. Earlier he suggested that a similar limiting for people suing charities and sporting bodies and government authorities for personal injury as a means of solving the crisis over public-liability insurance.

We have an insurance problem caused by the confluence of several events: higher reinsurance costs stemming from September 11; the collaspe of HIH insurance following imprudent grabbing of market share through lower premiums which flowed through the industry; a faster clearing of old cases by the courts.
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Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visit to Australia was but a brief one. The first for a Japanese Prime Minister for five years. The visit was long enough, though, to highlight the significant differences between the two countries. The differences were expressed with usual diplomatic niceties and they exist in the context of an underlying strength of a relationship built on the base of high-volume trade. But the differences underscore just how pragmatic that relationship is and how little give there is in it.

We export huge amounts of coal and iron ore to Japan because Japan needs and wants them. We import large amounts of Japanese elaborately manufactured items because Australians need and want them.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard told a state lunch than the relationship between Australia and Japan was the “”most broadly based Australia enjoys in the region” and that the economic relationship was “”wide and deep”. It was only so much diplomatic twaddle. The relationship is not especially broad; it is mainly economic rather than cultural. And the economic relationship is high volume — Japan is Australia’s biggest customer for exports and Australia is Japan’s second highest source of imports – but it is narrow.
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The discussion paper on higher education in Australia has resulted in a polarisation of views. On one hand, the Vice-Chancellors (broadly representing university management), students (the consumers) and staff have reacted by calling for more government money to be put into the sector. On the other hand, the Minister for Education, Brendan Nelson, has flatly rejected the idea until the universities come up with plans for change arising out of the review.

It is an unfortunate polarisation. In fact, both reform and more money are needed.

Going back to the 1980s, the Dawkins changes to the university system have been condemned for creating too many universities (perhaps as many as 25 of the 38 institutions) with too many courses not suited to academic discipline. That may be true, but whether they are called universities, colleges or technical schools, they serve a need in educating and training and need funding. Whatever the merit of the institutional changes, the Dawkins changes brought a potential source of that funding with the HECS system. It was a system of fees payable by students when they started earning the larger incomes that tertiary education invariably brought. It should have been the end to the universities’ funding woes. But it has not been because successive governments have put that money into consolidated revenue and barely given the universities credit for it. Instead universities have been continually squeezed and required to raise an increasing percentage of their revenue from other sources, particularly overseas students.
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Sometimes the child will not leave home voluntarily and hangs around bludging off the parent. So it was with the ACT. The parent, the Commonwealth, had to make the ACT take control of itself and, more importantly, pay for itself.

So it forced the ACT to take self-government. When it did so, it handed to the new ACT body politic a debt-free territory and nearly all the land of the territory, though reserving some for its own purposes. The land kept back by the Commonwealth was all the obvious stuff – the big national institutions, the diplomatic quarters, the trunk and ceremonial routes, and government departments. But it also included some odd spots which the Commonwealth thought it might want to use later.

This last category is causing strife.
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Much has been written about the erratic style of former Prime Minister John Gorton in the past week. One of his more erratic decisions is still being felt in Canberra today.

Gorton who died last week has been accorded a state funeral – the same honour Gorton as Prime Minister accorded Jim Fraser the Federal Labor Member for the ACT who died in 1970. Fraser won 67.7 per cent of the vote at the 1969 election and was an enormously popular local member. Gorton, naively thought the Liberals could gain the seat at the ensuing by-election.

The Liberals put up Clarrie Hermes, a well-liked Canberra magistrate. Labor put up Kep Enderby.
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The GST will take $520 million more next financial year than what was estimated a year ago.

And the increases continue in future years. The Budget papers show that the GST is the growth tax, rising faster than the sum of other taxes and estimated growth through to 2004-05.

The Budget papers, though, religiously leave out the GST from formal Commonwealth financial statements, because the Commonwealth argues that it is not a Commonwealth tax, but one that goes automatically to the states.

If it were considered a Commonwealth tax it would represent 14.5 per cent of Commonwealth revenue.
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Forty years ago, the big prediction of economists was that people would not know what to do with increased leisure time as more labour-saving devices came on the market and employees negotiated ever shorter working weeks. Now the employed are spending ever more time at work.

Forty years ago, unemployment rates of more than 3 per cent were considered a social catastrophe – even in the 1961 recession – and no-one imagined that it would be a decades-long scourge from the 1970s on.

It is a brave economist or social engineer who attempts to look 40 years on. The Intergeneration Report (Budget Paper No 5) does precisely that. Like all economics, it is laced with assumptions. But it is better to do the projections on current trends than to remain in the dark.
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