Crispin Hull

The Act Government seems to be facing a grim choice: reneging on election promises or job reductions in the public service or going into deficit.

Treasurer Ted Quinlan has asked all public service sections to make a 2 per cent efficiency gain. Any section that cannot would have to explain why. This marginally better than the salami slicing of the 1990s where every public service department took a cut, irrespective of the merits of their spending programs. But it is no substitute for looking harder at some areas of government funding to see if they can be cut out altogether so a greater concentration of effort can be made on the key areas of government activity that concern most Canberrans: health, education and police.

The question confronting Mr Quinlan is, what happens when a large number of public-service sections have “”good grounds” for not achieving a 2 per cent efficiency? Unfortunately, the large areas – education and health – are the easy targets for insisting on the efficiency dividend. And then Labor would be driven to giving with the left hand – an election promise of $27 million of education – and taking away with the right hand – a $7 million cut to education, or promising 20 new police officers before the election and taking away 16 officers through an efficiency drive. This much was pointed out by Deputy Opposition Leader Brendan Smyth.
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The effect of the decision to suspend Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth for a year should not be underestimated. It is too easy to dismiss the Commonwealth as impotent and irrelevant, particularly by people in Australia, Canada and Britain. Those rich, developed countries are members of many other powerful trade and political groupings which make the Commonwealth look less important. But from an African perspective the Commonwealth has greater significance. It is seen as one of the primary vehicles that brought democracy and black majority rule to Zimbabwe and South Africa in the first place. It is seen as an important vehicle for development aid, including aid in things like education, media, politics, medicine, law and so on. The Commonwealth has a greater comparative presence in Africa than the developed countries.

African nations have the United Nations – but they are less significant there. They have the Organisation of African states, but there are no developed nations there (with perhaps the exception of South Africa).
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It did not take long for the accusations that Senator Bill Heffernan made against High Court judge, Justice Michael Kirby, to unravel. Part of Senator’s Heffernan’s “”evidence” that Justice Kirby had used Commonwealth cars to pick up male prostitutes was the Commonwealth car diver’s job card. The job card included the names of others on Commonwealth business on the day in question, including Opposition MP Laurie Brereton and for MP Ian Sinclair. It would not have taken much to check with them whether they travelled on the dates in question. When the Daily Telegraph published the “evidence”, Mr Brereton saw his name on the sheet as having travelled in Sydney. He was in fact holidaying in Hayman Island.

The fact that the “”evidence” was so easily discredited reveals that Senator Heffernan was a best impetuous and lacking judgment, but also very likely that his judgment was clouded by his campaign against paedophilia and perhaps by homophobia.
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The Australian Labor Party is facing yet another period of self-doubt and self-reflection. At a state level, the party has never been more successful. It is in government in all eight Australian states and territories. Yet federally, it third election defeat in succession caused grave misgivings about the party’s direction. Those misgivings were in broadly three areas: the party’s organisation, its policy and the way it is selling itself.

Those misgivings manifested themselves at the weekend with the disclosure of a submission by federal front-bencher Lindsay Tanner to a party review panel that was set up after the last election and by the announcement by three major unions that they were considering disaffiliation with the party. The leaders of two of those unions resigned from the party, one of them joining the Greens.

Mr Tanner’s concerns were directed at party structures, rather than policy or how the policy and party were being presented to voters. His argument was that there was too much branch stacking which enabled too many union officials to party pre-selection. It meant that only those with full-time political ambitions had any reason to join the party. Those that wanted to make a contribution to policy or other organisation input that was not geared to a political career were despondent. Mr Tanner’s points are pertinent. Membership of all political parties, including Labor, is shrinking as a proportion of the population. Membership of a political party is now seen only as a gateway to pre-selection, not as an opportunity to contribute to policy development. Mr Tanner correctly surmises that this was hindering the prospects of the party getting the best candidates and the best policy. Labor has gone some way to addressing the branch-stacking question, though part of that back-fired, so more needs to be done.
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The good news is that the ACT recorded a large decrease in the number of stolen cars in 2000-01, compared to an Australia-wide increase. The bad news is that the ACT came off a high base. The ACT the second-highest number of thefts per 1000 vehicles registered, at 14, only just behind NSW. It may be that that is due to the fact that the ACT is the most urbanised jurisdiction in Australia.

The main reasons for the drop in the ACT is an increase in the use of immobilisers, changes to the bail laws and a greater police attention to car theft.

Still, more can be done on the technology side. Eighty percent of the theft is opportunistic joy-riding. A lot of this can be avoided by the fitting of immobilisers. In Western Australia – where vehicle theft has dropped 41 per cent since March 1998 – immobilisers are compulsory for all new registrations (even of older cars being moved from interstate). The state has a scheme to subsidise the supply and fitting of immobilisers. The ACT should look at a similar scheme. The proportion of older cars and cars not fitted with immobilisers that get stolen is out of proportion to their total numbers. As the car fleet get renewed, thieves are bound to concentrate more on the dwindling number of older cars.
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The Federal Labor Party announced this week that it would reject the majority of the Government’s proposed industrial-relations changes and instead put forward its own list of changes.

Labor’s own list has no hope of getting past first base because Labor does not have the number sin the House of Representatives. Nonetheless, it is a welcome sign of a change of attitude in the Opposition. Hitherto, the Opposition has made itself a small target with as little policy detail as possible put out until just before the election. That was based on the fact Prime Minister John Howard when in Opposition did the same thing and got himself elected in 1996 and the fact that John Hewson before him had lots of detail and lost. This theory ignores the more pertinent point that voters also look at what the policy is even if on occasion they have prefer the unknown to a continuation of an existing Government.

The Opposition should work over the next year or two to put more detailed policy up, even to the extent of draft legislation.
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The past two days has shown a different side of Canberra to the rest of Australia, and indeed parts of the rest of the world. The Bush Capital, the metonymical expression of government and bureaucracy, the planned city, the peopleless place divorced from reality, the good sheep station spoiled, the city without a soul and the suburbs in search of a centre were all put to one side.

In their place was the city of entrepreneurial spirit and creativity. The city and region were showcased in the Focus on Business conference.
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An independent review revealed yesterday that the Government has become over-zealous in catching and penalising people in breach of social security rules. The review as chaired by former Commonwealth Ombudsman, Professor Dennis Pearce, and funded by nine national welfare bodies.

The review found that Centrelink staff had been exposed to pressure and incentives top find breaches; were not communicating effectively with job-seekers; and imposed unreasonable conditions so that breaches were more likely. It called for less draconian penalties and a greater concentration on getting people into work.

Family and Community Services Minister Amanda Vanstone dismissed the report saying it was old because Centrelink had implemented or was about to implement 26 of the reports recommendations. Professor Pearce said that Centrelink had got hold of a draft of the report a month ago and made recommendations to the Government which were endorsed two weeks ago. They bore an uncanny resemblance to the review’s recommendations. But Professor Pearce said the authors of the report did not want to get into a fight about the origin of ideas. They just wanted to see the system improved.
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The people of the ACT should be especially concerned about the pay television deal struck between Foxtel and Optus. Subscribers to either service will now get access to the content of the other. Essentially, it makes Foxtel the monopoly provider of content for pay television. Foxtel is partly owned by Telstra. The Foxtel cable and satellite delivery network reaches 70 per cent of Australian households. Optus is happy with the deal because it can bundle some worthwhile pay television content with telephony packages to attract custom, and it is relieved of the burden of long-term commitments to paying for choice Hollywood content at very high prices. Telstra and Foxtel, too, can bundle telephony and pay television content to attract custom.

So where does that leave TransACT, the ACT cable network that is being rolled out using Actew’s access to the electricity easements and poles that reach every household in the ACT? TransACT has huge advantages on the hardware-infrastructure side. And under federal law it has access to the Telstra telephony network so it can provide telephony services at competitive prices.

Also under federal pay television content providers can get access to Foxtel’s cable network.
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Amid all the controversy over the children overboard and the Governor-General, the Australian economy has been bubbling along quite nicely, thank-you very much.

Figures issued yesterday show that in the December quarter the Australian economy grew by 1.3 per cent, to make an annualised growth rate of 4.1 per cent. That is a much better result than most industrialised economies.

The Government can take considerable credit for that. Despite its ghastly divisive social record, it has managed the economy better than the Hawke-Keating Governments in critical respects. Under its tenure, interest rates have fallen dramatically. This has reduced the amount people have to pay on their mortgages, thus improving the living standards of many Australians. It has also ensured that the value of savings of retirees and other in the form of cash and liquid deposits has not been eroded. The low interest rates have been the result of fiscal rectitude in the early years of the Howard Government. It took the hard decisions on Government spending and hauled the Budget into surplus, despite the pain and screams from those who had hitherto benefitted from large government spending programs.
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