Crispin Hull

The Governor of the Reserve bank, Ian Macfarlane, expressed concern last week that major Australian companies might react in a knee-jerk way to any signs of a downturn in the economy. He warned them against wielding the scalpel to workforces if profits looked like falling. He said chief executives might think that being tough with lay-offs would protect share prices because the market would think well of such conduct. It might be true if only one company did it, but if a lot of major companies did it, it would be an error. Earnings were meant to fall off in economic circumstances like those at present, but the more jobs were cut the deeper the downward cycle would be. There would be fewer people out there spending.

It was all standard economics. Indeed, similar words are used by economic historians to describe the lead into the Great Depression. But there are differences. We have better economic information gathering these days, so we are in a position to take pre-emptive action. And this is precisely what Mr Macfarlane has done. Last week the Reserve Bank reduced interest rates by a quarter of one per cent, and indicated another cut was possible early in the new year. That should encourage companies to accept that earning can fall in the short term without needing to cut jobs. However, in a fairly ruthless, market-driven world, we cannot expect individual boardrooms to act in the broad community interest, despite the urgings of the Reserve Bank Governor.
Continue reading “2001_12_december_leader10dec economy”

The reason the vote in the ACT Legislative Assembly appeared to wander all over the place over the past week and a half was the freakish closeness of the vote.

Indeed, it was so close that Labor came within 350 votes of obtaining a majority of nine seats.

The ACT Electoral Commission did a computer crunch of the preferences after each day’s keying in of ballot papers. It treated all the votes counted as if they were the whole electorate and counted all the preferences of all of them.
Continue reading “2001_11_november_vote close”

In 1969, as a consequence of the 1969 election, my parents bought a television set.

Hitherto, my father, who thought all music penned after 1890 was unbearably romantic smultchz or impossibly tuneless cacophony, would not have a television in the house.

I was the reason for the change of mind.
Continue reading “2001_11_november_tv for forum”

It seems likely that the balance of power in the Senate will change when the new senators elected yesterday take their seats on July 1 next year.

The Coalition has successfully defended its good 1996 (SUBS: correct 1996) Senate result, the Democrats have possibly lost two seats and One Nation’s Pauline Hanson is close to election as a Senator in Queensland.

It will change the overall political position in the Senate. The Government can get a majority with One Nation or the Greens. The Democrats can no longer join Labor on its own to get a majority.
Continue reading “2001_11_november_senate2001”

Why the fuss over preferences? In a straw poll around the office, I asked the question: how many seats were determined by preferences at the last election? That is, in how many seats did the leading vote-getter at the first count change after the distribuition of preferences so someone else got elected?

About 20 was a typical reply. The fuss over preferences suggests that they decide elections. Not so. Preferences have very little effect in the House of Representatives.

At the last election, just five seats changed from one major party to the other.
Continue reading “2001_11_november_preference fuss”

Media ownership is on the agenda again. Communications Minister Senator what Richard Alston makes some sensible and of these points are about why a the present laws should be relaxed. Alston will try to put the Democrats and the Labour Party on the spot by presenting proposals to remove the two great pillars of ownership restriction: that no-one can own both a broadcasting licence and a daily newspaper in the one city and that foreign ownership is limited to 15 per cent of a broadcasting licence.

These laws were first created by Labor in the mid-1980s when Paul Keating said media moguls could be queens of screen or princes of print, but not both. The theory was that diversity of opinion required diverse ownership.

Since then, the big media owners have been sniffing around government and opposition leaders desperate for favours in the form of replacing the restrictions. US citizen Rupert Murdoch, who owns the highest circulating daily newspaper in all but two capitals, would nearly like to get into some Australian television action. Kerry Packer, owner of the Nine network, would dearly love to get his hands on the Fairfax newspaper chain.
Continue reading “2001_11_november_media ownership forum”

As the election nears, pollsters, commentators, party apparatchiks, lobbyists, political staffers and everyone else whose livelihood is affected by the outcome look at the tea leaves, interview their keyboards and crunch their numbers to get a feel of where the election is heading.

They wonder where the voters are heading. Where will they move. Will they shift to Labor, or back to the Coalition. Where will the voters preferences move to? The voters are seen like some vast school of silver fish in a David Attenborough-narrated croc doc, shimmering this way and then shimmering that way.

But maybe this view of the psephological world has it the wrong way around.
Continue reading “2001_11_november_media for forum”

The inquiry into a the detention of children at a Australia’s immigration detention centres by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission will or not add up a great deal to what most right-thinking Australians already know: that putting children who have not committed any crime or into detention is immoral and should be an acceptable in a Australia.

Nonetheless, the inquiry must be welcome. For a start it indicates that Australia, as a pluralist, liberal democracy, is not run on the basis of whomever wins government gets its way no matter what. The Executive Government of the Commonwealth is just one of many sources of power. There are the states, the judiciary and the Parliament and the statutory bodies created by it and there are media organisations that can re[port the dealings of these other heads of power to change public opinion. In this instance the commission is exercising power granted to it by an Act of Parliament to conduct an inquiry. It is an inquiry that the Federal Government would no doubt prefer did not happen. The Government, though the Minister for Immigration. Philip Ruddock, has agreed to “”co-operate” with the inquiry. In the same breath the Minister belittled the inquiry, suggesting that it would be a vehicle for people who wanted to change the Government’s policy of detention for asylum seekers. Mr Ruddock also pre-empted the inquiry by saying that unaccompanied minors were often sent ahead by “”queue-jumping, illegals” to give the parents a better chance of getting permanent residence. Fair enough, he should have his say, however misguided or inventive it is. However, it is a sharp contrast to the occasions when governments use the fact that an inquiry or court case is afoot to avoid having to making a comment.

The inquiry will air matters that the Government has done its best to conceal. It has created immigration detention centres far away from population centres. It has made it as difficult as it can to prevent media coverage of what goes on in those centres. It has made it as difficult as possible for migrant support groups and other charities to get access to those detained, particularly children. Despite that, complaints have still trickled through to the commission, sufficient for it to set up an inquiry.
Continue reading “2001_11_november_leader30nov detention”

The federal secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Greg Combet, has warned the Labor Party to be careful about watering down its approach to unfair dismissal laws. But it is not only the Labor Party that should be careful about changes to the unfair dismissal laws. The Government needs to take care, too.

The Government has long had on its agenda a plan to make small business exempt from the unfair-dismissal laws. The plan has been opposed by Labor and the Democrats, who have blocked earlier proposals in the Senate. Labor and the Democrats still have the numbers in the Senate, so the fate of any proposals lie in their hands. Both the Labor Leader Simon Crean and the Opposition spokesman on workplace relations, Robert McClelland, have indicated that with the election of the Howard Government for a third term, it now has a greater mandate. Mr Crean has also made it plain that he would like to see a change in the relationship between the union movement and Labor, so that the union movement would have less influence. Maybe he sees his history as a former president of the ACTU as electoral baggage.

The Government might be tempted, therefore, to test Mr Crean’s new stand to the limit by re-submitting its proposal to exempt small business from the unfair dismissal laws. If so, it would be wrong in principle and would perhaps backfire.
Continue reading “2001_11_november_leader28nov unfari dismissal”

As science gets ever closer to producing a human clone, legislators, ethicists and scientists themselves are grappling with the question of where and how to draw the line. It would be nice to imagine that merely by passing a law, the whole thing will go away. However, the history of its human society shows that if the technology is there, it is likely top be used. We may as well prepare ourselves for the fact of the production of a cloned human being.

When it happens, the created human being will have to be acknowledged either as a human being or just a mass of cells. The choice will be a fairly clear. Once the creature displays the usual attributes of being human there will be no choice. The created being we will inevitably be granted the full rights of all other human beings. After all, whatever its genetic make-up it will have to be born and will be demonstrably human

It would be as well to try to limit and the number of people created this way, but prohibition can only be partially successful. Thirty years ago society was presented with what was then the ghastly prospect of test-tube babies. These babies were created by fertilisation outside the human body – – something hitherto regarded as an anathema from science fiction. But now these so-called test-tube babies have grown to adulthood and some have children of their own. They are loved by their “parents”, their children, other relatives and friends just like anyone else, and receive the same protection of law as anyone else.
Continue reading “2001_11_november_leader27nov embryo”