Crispin Hull

The difference of view by the Smith Family and the Centre for Independent Studies over how many people in Australia are living in poverty may sound like a sterile, arcane, academic dispute that cuts the fine lines of statistical analysis. But at the basis of the debate are some important questions about the extent and definition of poverty and what should be done about it.

The Smith Family says 13 per cent of people live on or below the poverty line – 14.9 per cent of children and 12.3 per cent of adults. This is up from a decade ago.
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Pauline Hanson has retired again. This time, however, any comeback to a position of power or influence in the One Nation Party looks remote. Moreover, though she has retained party membership and reserved the right to seek One Nation pre-selection for a seat in Parliament, it is unlikely she will get it. She had a run in the last federal election and failed to get a Queensland Senate seat largely due to the fact that One Nation failed to secure any preference deals of significance. And at the previous election she failed to get re-elected to the House of Representatives after her seat of Oxley was cut in two during the redistribution.

As things stand, the powerbase of One Nation has shifted from Queensland to Western Australia, where there are three One Nation Legislative Council members.

Further Ms Hanson has other things on her plate. She says she has seven legal cases to contend with. She faces a committal hearing in April on fraud charges arising from the registration of the One Nation party in Queensland.
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The Federal executive of the ALP has blocked an attempt by backbencher Duncan Kerr to move from Federal to state politics. Mr Kerr was elected to the fairly safe Labor seat of Denison at the federal election in November. It was such a short time ago. He stood to represent the people of Denison in the Federal Parliament for three years. Nothing has changed in his personal circumstances that makes him less capable of representing them. He has not suddenly got ill or had some family crisis.

Rather Mr Kerr has decided that he does not like the idea of serving in Opposition. He wants to be part of a Government team. He saw that there was a Tasmanian state election coming up sometime this year, probably in November, but perhaps earlier. The Tasmania state Labor Government is likely to be re-elected.

The Hobart-based federal seat of Denison which he now holds has exactly the same boundaries as the Tasmanian state of Denison because the Tasmanian state parliament uses the federal boundaries of the five Tasmanian seats combined with the multi-member Hare-Clark system which provides for six members in each of the five electorates to make a lower house of 30. Mr Kerr would be appealing to exactly the same people he appealed to federally in 2001 to elect him to the state Parliament. He would hope to be elected and become a Minister in the new state Government.
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The Federal Government is preparing new legislation on media ownership to be introduced in the first session this year. The legislation will change the existing laws which limit each individual foreign investor to a 15 per cent holding in a free-to-air television network, 20 per cent in pay TV and 25 per cent in major newspapers. They also limit a proprietor from owning both a newspaper and television station in one market.

The great difficulty with media law changes in Australia is that governments of both sides of politics fear upsetting the major protagonists. Past experience shows that any government brave enough to propose changes that would affect the interests of major proprietors get savaged. It means that reform that puts the public interest first has escaped Australian Parliaments. Occasionally a compromise goes through, when the major proprietors see it as not offending their interests. In the period of the Hawke Government the present laws were framed so that, in the words of Paul Keating, one could either be a prince of print or a queen of the screen, but not both. At the time Kerry Packer was concentrating on television and Rupert Murdoch on print, so it suited them.

Times have changed. Mr Packer has since intensified his ambition to control the Fairfax newspapers and Mr Murdoch has his eye on setting up a fourth commercial television network.
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The United States is behaving in a reprehensible way in its treatment of people it has captured in Afghanistan. It has shipped them – sedated and hooded – half way around the world to its military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (The US holds the base under a 1903 lease in perpetuity and kept hold of it after Fidel Castro and the communists came to power.)

US authorities have got themselves into a legal and moral twist over the question. The question must be asked: one what basis are these people being held? Are they suspects in a crime committed in the United States? Are they prisoners of war? Or are they something else?

It appears the US would like the last option: something else. Some have called them “”battlefield detainees”. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called them “”unlawful combatants”. It seems these words are aimed at defining the detainees out of the classification prisoner of war or crime suspect. This is because if they are prisoners of war the US has responsibilities under the 1949 Geneva Conventions. These include access by the Red Cross, respect for religious practice and some minimal conditions under which they are kept. Apparently, these are not being complied with. Moreover, if they are prisoners of war they should be released at the end of hostilities. Those hostilities are likely to end fairly soon, because the US does not want a protracted military presence in Afghanistan. But the US “”war on terrorism” will go much longer and the US will want to keep these people for the duration.
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Many Canberrans would say that one of the most pleasing parts of this year’s Summernats was they were contained within Exhibition Park in Canberra – unseen and unheard. Also, the crowds were well-behaved, with very few traffic offences or offensive behaviour, according to police. This latter point would not matter to many Canberrans who would not care two hoots what the patrons of Summernats did to each other, provided they did it within the confines of EPIC – among consenting adults in private, as it were.

One of the main reasons for the good behaviour, according to police and organisers, was the ban on alcohol. Indeed, about the only incident of violence arose while a man tried to smuggle some alcohol in. Alcohol had to be purchased on site. It was expensive and was opened and poured into plastic cups at time of purchase – this reduced consumption considerably. Organisers said, however, the alcohol ban had resulted in lower attendance. Attendance was down 20,000 to 95,000, but 95,000 well-behaved patrons was better than 115,000 unruly ones.

In some respects, this motoring apartheid is unfortunate. One does not want to see a return to the unruly days of the early 1990s when Summernats was synonymous with raucous, drunken behaviour, burn-outs on public streets, violence, roadside camping with destruction of trees, pollution and littering. However, Canberra is graced with some stupendous pieces of motoring machinery in the week of Summernats. Given the good behaviour this year, surely it is time for the restoration of the street parade for the Summernats entrants. Moreover, there would be no harm in having the parade go down Northbourne Avenue, say, around 6.30pm while it is still light. Suitable detours could be made for other traffic.
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A row has broken out over the state of the Federal Government’s accounts. Labor’s Treasury spokesman, Bob McMullan, accused the Government this week of trying to cover up the fact that it is the highest taxing government in Australia’s history by not including the GST as a federal tax. He said it was not some mere technicality, “”this is the Auditor-General conducting the official audit of the Commonwealth’s books and saying they don’t meet the proper accounting standards”. He demanded that Treasurer Peter Costello return from holiday to clarify the state of the nation’s books.

The auditor may have a technical point, but it is only that. Mr McMullan’s call for Mr Costello to return from holidays was a hyperbolic absurdity. The Auditor-General brought down his report on December 21 – before the holiday began. It seems that the Opposition (and the media) were on holiday and missed the report and its significance, if there was any. The nation rolled on. It was an opportunistic politicians’ grandstand.

Whether the GST is put under the column of state revenue or federal revenue is not of huge moment. The Federal Government has argued that because legislation guarantees that all GST revenue goes to the states it should be counted as a state tax. That argument has some merit, in the same way that the taxes for tobacco, alcohol and petrol have been collected by the Commonwealth on behalf of the states ever since the High Court ruled that under the Constitution they were excises – a form of tax over which the Constitution grants the Commonwealth exclusive jurisdiction – and not “”licence fees” as the states had pretended.
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The Leader of the National Party, John Anderson, has signaled that he will reform his party by taking it from a “”collection of state-based parties” to a party that must accept more federal direction. “”We have to operate as a focused, co-ordinated, federally-oriented federal team.” He said that the specifics of his proposals were a matter for the party internally, but they would be about funds management, the federal directorship, and strategies for individual electorates and pre-selecting appropriate candidates.

There is something seriously missing here. Policy.

The National Party lost two seats to the Liberal Party – one of them the seat vacated by the former leader Tim Fischer – and one to an independent – former National MP Bob Katter. The National Party is down to 13 Members of the House of Representatives. The loss to Mr Katter symbolises the National Party’s fundamental difficulty – that while in Government with the Liberals it has to juggle loyalties between a Coalition partner which is economically dry, on one hand, and its grass-roots constituency which is economically interventionist, on the other. Typical rural constituents likes Government to provide subsidies for telecommunications, uneconomic roads and railways and for the wherewithal of agricultural production. They want agricultural marketing arrangements that offend the rules of competition. These are an anathema to the philosophy of the Liberal Party. The only two economic policies the Nationals and the Liberals share are labour-market reform and free external trade, and even then many Nationals only support free export trade and would happily see an end to the influence of globalisation that makes inefficient rural non-exporting industry unviable.
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The power of the computer has caught up with hundreds of thousands of people who were illegally claiming welfare payments. Data from the Australian Taxation Office, Centrelink and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs was matched over the past three years. The data-matching identified 210,921 welfare cheats who then had payments reduced or cancelled. Many had to repay.

The total amount saved was $550 million.

It is a fairly impressive saving since the data-matching law came into force three years ago. There has been some concern about welfare-bashing and privacy, but these concerns should not deter the continuation of data-matching.
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The Australian Government appears determined to press on with its policy of putting Air Marshals aboard Australian domestic flights. This is despite an apparent change of heart in Britain, where the Government and the airlines have opted for greater security on the ground to ensure that dangerous items do not get on the aircraft in the first place.

The Australian Government would be well-advised to revisit the scheme in light of what is being done in Britain. The chief executive Britain’s Air transport Users Council, Simon Evans, said, “”Sky marshals are impracticable. There are 460,000 flights from Heathrow alone each year.” Similarly, there are tens of thousands of flights in and out of Sydney, yet Australia has plans for just 111 marshals, just 22 scheduled to begin duty soon.

It is absurd to thinks that potential hijackers would abandon their plans on the basis of the remote chance of running into one of the marshals. More likely, they would continue, but perhaps be more wary and more dangerous.
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