Crispin Hull

This week the Victorian Supreme Court brought out the red flags. It was the same red flag that legal authorities required to be waved by a walking person in front of the devilish new contraption called the automobile.

This week it was the Internet.

Justice Hedigan was hearing a case brought by the Melbourne businessman and flamboyant owner of the Melbourne Football Club, Joseph Gutnick. Gutnick was suing for defamation over an article published in the Wall Street Journal. In normal circumstances, he would have no action in Victoria because the Wall Street Journal is not published there. However, the Wall Street Journal and its investment advisory magazine, Barrons, is published on the internet — some free and some by subscription.
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There, before 600 or 700 people in at the Great Hall of Parliament House and the nation itself was the unstated corollary.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, was addressing a National Press Club lunch which had been moved up the hill to Parliament house because of a double booking at the club itself. Howard was extolling the virtues of his first two terms and explaining why a he should get a third.

He concentrated, as he has done in nearly three decades of public life, on economic matters. In particular, he talked about taxation. However, to the extent that his speech contained an element of social concern it was for and about the ageing population.
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Prime Minister John Howard says he is listening. However, when it comes to the drug problem it seems that he is only listening to what he wants it to here. If there is a squawking pressure group which is threatening to cost the Coalition some votes then Mr Howard is happy to throw some money at them to shore up his electoral support. However, if there is a really difficult policy decision which requires courage and leadership he turns a deaf ear.

Last week the head of the National Crime Authority, Gary Crooke, said governments should consider treating heroin addiction as a medical problem and should consider supplying heroin from a government-controlled repository to registered addicts. Mr Crooke cited damning statistics about heroin in Australia under prohibitionist policies. In the mid-1980s there were an estimated 34,000 heroin addicts consuming about three tonnes a year of heroin. Now, an estimated 74,000 people were addicted to the drug and they were using about at 6.7 tonnes of heroin a year. Authorities had seized just 734 kilograms of heroin in the past year, less than 12 per cent of the amount being used. The number of heroin users was up from an estimated 0.4 per cent of the adult population in 1995 to 0.7 per cent in 1998 and overdose deaths had gone from 302 in 1989 to 958 in 1999.

Mr Crooke came to the obvious conclusion that present policies are not working.
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The journalistic cliche for the change of a political decision is “back flip”. It is perhaps a misplaced metaphor. When one does a back flip one ends up in the same at position as when one started. A better description would be an about-face or a back-down. In the year since the introduction of a the GST, the Government has done a number of about-faces or back-downs. It changed the quarterly business activity statement to an annual statement. It scrapped the extra 1.5 cents-a-litre petrol excise increase. It changed at the tax system for a self-funded a retirees and pensioners. It gave an amnesty for families who had overstated their income thus affecting their entitlement to family allowance. And this week the Government backed away from its 80-20 rule that a deemed people earning 80 per cent of their income from one employer to be employees not independent contractors.

The latest about-face comes a week before the government faces a critical by-election in the outer Melbourne seat of Aston. The relationship between the events is obvious. Indeed, the about-faces listed above have only occurred since Coalition losses in the Western Australian and Queensland state elections in February.

The government likes to portray these changes in policies as examples of a government willing and capable to listen to the electorate and to make changes accordingly. A less generous interpretation would have it that it the government is panicking and making a policy changes on the hop in order to prevent angry voters deserting the coalition.
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IN 1904, the Governor-General, Baron Northcote, refused a request (or more technically, advice) from Labor Prime Minister John Christian Watson.

Watson had only been prime minister a few months after the protectionist-free trade coalition of Alfred Deakin fell apart. Watson was in a minority. After only a few months in office and less than a year after the 1903 election he found that George Reid, a free trader, was putting together a majority that would defeat him on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Rather than meekly surrender the prime ministership to Reid, Watson went to the Governor-General to seek an early election. Northcote denied him and called upon Reid to form a government.

We now turn to 1975 and the sacking of the Whitlam Government by Governor-General John Kerr after the Senate denied it supply.

Then in 1983, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser went to Governor-General Ninian Stephen and sought a double dissolution of parliament and an early election. Stephen sent him away to get detailed justification. In the meantime, the Labor Party changed its leader from Bill Hayden to Bob Hawke, possibly affecting the result of the election.
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There they were, shaking hands in an unholy alliance at the Property Council lunch this week — the Liberal Minister for Planning, Brendan Smyth, and his Labor Opposition counterpart, Simon Corbell.

In this election year there they were brown-nosing themselves to the development lobby, attempting to outdo each other on what concessions they could give to make it easier for developers to make money — Smyth representing the moneyed classes and Corbell representing the unions which gain power from representing the people who do the constructing. It was the alliance for short term monetary again over the long term amenity and lifestyle of the bulk of the people of Canberra.

Both have promised the Property Council that they would curtail the right of of the residents to to appeal against development proposals.

Where has Simon Corbell been these past three years? Has he no idea of the fury out there in the suburbs as a residents feel powerless against the onslaught of the unbridled in-fill, redevelopment and change of land use. Now he is proposing to further curtail any chance residents have against developers. This system is already egregiously stacked against residents. Developers with greater resources and greater experience of the system invariably get their way. Moreover, developers get tax deductions for all of their costs involved and the planning process. Meanwhile, residents who were quietly minding their own business only to find that suddenly their landscape is to be radically changed for the worse, have to dig into their own resources of time and money to resist what they see as unsuitable and intrusive development.
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The Prime Minister, John Howard, will have to make up his mind soon as to what is more important: that the parliamentary wing does not interfere with the organisational wing of the Liberal Party, or that the Liberal Party should make a clear stand that it is against the far-right, racist policies of the One Nation party.

Mr Howard will also have to make up his mind on a more practical level whether it is better for his party to do a deal with One Nation or whether his party will get more support from Australian voters if it makes a stand against One Nation.

The issue arose at the weekend at the Western Australian state Conference of the Liberal Party. The conference voted unanimously in it favour of a motion which said that the state executive should allocate “preferences in consultation with campaign committees with the intention of maximising boats in the individual seats.”
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Former Deputy Prime Minster Tim Fischer announced last week that he was now in favour of Australia becoming a republic. This is significant in itself, coming as it does from a National Party MP and a former National Party leader. Hitherto, the National Party had been one of the major supporters of continuation with the constitutional monarchy. Interestingly enough, Mr Fischer said he had changed his view after widespread discussions in his electorate.

Perhaps of greater its significance, however, is that Mr Fischer outlined in some detail different methods of bringing the constitutional change about. He rather quaintly called these the green and the gold option. Many people might be frightened by the complexity of Mr Fischer’s proposals. However, they certainly offer a way out of the present Republican impasse.

This impasse has arisen out of the way that the Constitution has to be changed in Australia and the seemingly intractable divisions among Republicans as to what sort of republic Australia should be. At present, the Constitution requires that before there can be a change, a majority of people in a majority of states must support a proposal and the proposal must be a simple yes or no option to change words in the Constitution or to add words to it. At present, opinion polls suggest that a substantial majority of the Australian population would like to see an Australian republic, an Australian head of state and the severing of the remaining formal ties with the monarchy. However, it seems that many people who want a republic would prefer the continuation of the present system rather than have a republic of a kind to which they are opposed.
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The Government’s appetite for expensive election stuns continues unabated. The most recent example is yesterday’s decision to launch a Royal Commission into the building industry. In announcing the Royal Commission, Prime Minister John Howard said it was being called because of unacceptable practices and examples of criminal behaviour in the industry.

The Minister for Workplace Relations, Tony Abbott, said, “This is an industry which, in the past month, has seen absolutely outrageous attempts to nobble police inquiries, threaten witnesses, and pervert the course of justice.”

The difficulty for the Government in justifying the expense of a Royal commission is that on the Government’s own admission knowledge of illegal activity in the building industry is widespread. If we know that illegal activity is going on, why do we need an expensive Royal Commission to find out about it.?

Moreover, this Royal Commission will be just a repeat of a the Gyles Royal Commission into the construction industry in its NSW which reported in 1992. That commission found widespread illegality, absence of law enforcement and a reversion to the law of the jungle. That commission cost $24 million.
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The revelation that Australian banks have reaped a record $6.26 billion from account fees in the past year has caused an outcry from consumers and the opposition Labor Party. A Reserve Bank report showed that charges by banks have gone up by 50 per cent since 1997. They accounted for 24 per cent of bank income in 2000, up from a 21 per cent in 1997.

Transaction fees for households rose 49 per cent in the past three years and credit card charges rose 27 per cent. The average number of free transactions has shrunk from 11 to eight and the average minimum balance required for fee-free banking rose from $500 to $2,000. Businesses, on the other hand, paid 12 per cent more in fees over the three years.

On their face, these figures appear fairly damning. They were certainly enough for Opposition Leader Kim Beazley to reaffirm his commitment to legislate for a social contract with banks to provide fee-free accounts for pensioners and families unless the banks came up with a satisfactory voluntary scheme. They were enough for the Australian Consumers Association to call for government regulation to set some minimum standards for the banking industry.
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