Crispin Hull

The Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, is on the right track with Knowledge Nation. The Labor Party received a report this week from a committee it had appointed to examine ways in which Australia could become what is now called a “”Knowledge Nation”. The committee brought to forward a number of uncosted recommendations that ranged from higher retention rates, so that 90 per cent of teenagers have Year 12 or higher, to the doubling of research and development financing by 2010. Other recommendations included the creation of 1000 commercial and university research positions to encourage Australian scientists and researchers to return home, significant increases in public funding of universities, the boosting of online education and the making of access to digital broadband a national priority.

An immediate attack has been made up on the program because it is uncosted and represents just a wish-list, in the words of Prime Minister John Howard.

Some of the reaction indicates the difficulty of the Opposition’s task. On one hand, many people are crying out for leadership and vision and a movement away from the bean-counting mentality. On the other hand, many people are shouting where is the money coming from.
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The Government’s decision to waive debts of up to $1,000 for about 400,000 families who have been overpaid family tax benefits is the wrong deed for the wrong reason.

The matter arose as a result of the introduction of the new tax system. Eleven separate benefits were very sensibly brought down to three, and a new method of calculating them was applied. The old system was unfair because if people understated their income, they would not be able to retrieve the entitlements they would have got if they had stated it correctly in the first place. The Coalition introduced a system whereby people could tell Centrelink of their income as it varied and their family benefits would be varied accordingly. However, many people did not tell Centrelink when their income rose. As a result, when their final income was totalled at the end of the financial year it would it transpire that they had been paid too much family allowance. In the ordinary course of events, they would be required to repay the overpayment. However, it is not “the ordinary course of events”. It is instead, the lead-up to a federal election. Moreover, it is the first anniversary of the introduction of the new tax system so the Government is sensitive to criticism.
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The retirement of independent ACT Michael Moore and the movement to the crossbench of National Party MP Bob Katter highlight of the huge difference in potential between independents in the two jurisdictions.

Federally, an independent verges on the powerless. In the ACT, on the other hand an independent has the potential to be an enormous force against abuses of power by an the major parties.

Katter’s move to the backbench will change nothing. He could hardly be less forthright in his criticism of the direction of the Government. It is possible he will be even less influential as an independent because the media will no longer seek him out as a controversial person who kicks his own side.

In federal politics the lower house which determines the Government is elected on a single-member constituency basis. It verges on the impossible for a person to stand and win as an independent. In the past two decades, only Ted Mack, Peter Andren and Phil Cleary have stood for the House from nomination time as independents and been elected. Others have moved from major parties, like Katter. But with 147 or 148 members, the government of the day has usually had a majority that would subsume the three or four independents in the House.
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Former Chief Justice Gerard Brennan made some pertinent comments about our Constitution to this week.

He said, “The advice “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” might apply to plumbing, but not to the Constitution of a nation in a rapidly changing environment.”

He then outlined several elements of the Constitution which are definitely broke. These are not matters of everyday significance but they profoundly affect the administration of justice in Australia.

The framers of our Constitution did a first-rate job given the political and social and economic environment and of the time. But even they recognised that their creation would require occasional fixing up. That is why they provided for a mechanism to amend the Constitution that they created. Amendments require the assent of a majority of people in a majority of states. It was deliberately made difficult to get an amendment, but it has been made even more difficult by the fact that amendments can only be proposed by the federal parliament, which means in effect they have to be initiated by the federal government. And the federal government is made up of politicians who are more interested in the next election that the long-term framework of the Australian polity.
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Blackadder was justified be kinder to Shakespeare when he visited him a second in his time machine on Monday night. Earlier, he had castigated Shakespeare for being the scourge of every schoolboy. On the second visit he praised his prescience. A scene involving a time machine that was especially apt for Shakespeare, the playwright who transcends time.

On Friday morning on the ABC’s AM program, Treasurer Peter Costello, more than 400 years after the play had been written, was behaving just like Hamlet. It has been Costello’s outrageous fortune to have John Howard as his stubborn, resilient, accidental leader, preventing him from succeeding to a leadership which he thinks should be naturally his.

Costello was being questioned about assertions in a new biography by Age journalist Shaun Carney that Costello thought that Howard was uncomfortable at some level with the prevalence of Asian faces in Australia, that Howard seemed lost in the prime ministership and by mid-1999 had unofficially retired.
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I was shocked. And it takes quite a lot to shock me. A friend I had known for more than 20 years was suggesting something. This friend is one of the world’s decent people. And yet on this occasion he was suggesting that a certain amount of corruption is a good thing.

Excuse me if I don’t give you the full details of names, countries and facts, but as the story unfolds it will be obvious why.

The friend, Friend One, and another friend, Friend Two, were sitting around the table and at the question of coastal development came up. I mentioned that the Carr Government had decided to take control of all development approval within a kilometre of the NSW coastline. I extolled one of my pet theories that the smaller the level of government, the higher the level of corruption. We have seen coastal shire councils dismissed on the grounds of corruption and state government administrators appointed to run the show for a year or two before a new democratic (and susceptible-to-corruption) council could be put into place.

I developed the theory a little further suggesting that the closer land is to places of attraction the more corrupt process of planning will be. And so if one has a small level of government near the wonderfully attractive NSW, corruption is bound to be rife.
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Nairobi the city was out of place. It seemed to be put upon the grassland. And sure enough as we drove in from the airport there was a giraffe in the grass a hundred metres from the road. In the distance were some skyscrapers in the misplaced smog. In town there were equally misplaced expatriate squash players and Hash House Harrier runners drinking beer and pink gins next to swimming-pools and behind a brick walls shielding them from the traffic, blackness and poverty without.

So Kenya is not a great big game park, but has a city with the office workers, traffic lights, shops, crowds and of restaurants.

And it is to a restaurant that I want to take you now.

I am now to break a self imposed taboo of some two and half decades and will attempt a restaurant review.

Several kilometres from the centre of Nairobi, down some dirt-tracks and back on to the bitumen and then down some streets where lighting had never been erected, is the well-lit and well-heeled Carnivore Restaurant. It serves bread and salad on sufferance as an afterthought. Meat is its forte. As you enter the restaurant you pass a pit of fire over which large joints of meat are rotating, dripping fizzles of blood on to the red hot coals beneath.
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You can go to a hundred zoos. You can look at a thousand animal calendars or posters. You can be utterly familiar with all their shapes and colours from films and nature documentaries. And still there is uncontainable, childish excitement at seeing, for the first time, the real thing – the big African mammals in the wild, in their own environment.

For a start, the roles are reversed. The animals have the huge expanse of the Serengeti plain and the vast floor of the Ngorongoro Crater. They are not in the enclosed box of a zoo’s cage or a television showing a documentary. The humans are caged inside safari Land-Rovers. Did the lions wonder if were ever allowed out of those small metal boxes into which we were crammed?

The walls of Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania form the natural boundary of one of the world’s greatest wildlife sanctuaries – home to about 20,000 large animals. Flamingos on the lake’s edge; lions hiding in the long grass; buffalo, elephant, half a dozen species of antelope, rhino and so

Every morning they have two sorts of visitors. A limited number of Maasai people are allowed to take their cattle down to drink in the lake before bringing them back before nightfall. And seven or eight white Land-Rovers each with up to eight tourists come down to shoot the wildlife. Their weapons are cameras, though some have telephoto lens almost as long as rifles. Each vehicle had a pop-up roof through which the caged tourists looked at the animals.
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The British Labour Party is basking in a richly undeserved landslide. At time of writing yesterday evening, Labour had 413 of the 634 seats decided. There are 659 seats in the House of Commons so it the results from 634 seats can be extrapolated with some accuracy.

Labour obtained 65.2 per cent of the seats in Thursday’s election. It did so on just 42.3 per cent of the vote. And given that there was a voter turnout of less than 65 per cent, Labor got just 28 per cent of the vote at of the national electorate. Yet it was declared by Prime Minister Tony Blair as a triumph and a landslide for Labour. It is amazing what an electoral system can do to translate votes into either a landslide or a cliff-hanger. Margaret Thatcher got similar small votes and large seat counts for the Conservatives in the 1980s

Meanwhile this time, the Conservatives got just 164 seats of the 628 declared by yesterday evening Australian time. That was 26.1 per cent of the total decided, and yet the Conservatives got 32.5 per cent of the vote. In short, Labor got nearly 40 percentage points more seats that the Conservatives yet got just 10 percentage points at more vote than them. (Contrast that to the conservative Liberal party getting 10 percentage points more than Labor in Ginninderra last ACT election, yet getting the same number fo seats.
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THIS week we learnt that house prices in the ACT had shot up in the year to the end of March. The median house price in the ACT at the end of March was $195,000 – – an 11.4 per cent increase over the year.

The ACT government must be licking its lips in glee. This is because with every increase in property values it gets a large windfall in increased stamp duty. The growth of stamp duty on house transfers in the past 20 years has been insidious. Governments which put their hands on their hearts and say watch my lips – “no higher taxes” — ignore the way the stamp duty system works. Unlike rates and land tax, there has been no significant adjustment in the progressive scale of stamp duty for 20 years. Now stamp duty is a huge rip-off by government, and falls erratically on the population who happen at to buy and real-estate any given year. The rate of stamp duty is now so high it must be acting as a deterrent to people moving into more suitable accommodation.

With rates and land tax, on the other hand, when property values go up the government strikes a lower rate in the dollar to compensate for that, so that the overall tax take remains about the same. The reason governments do this is because the broad population pays rates every year and if they went up too steeply there would be a voter backlash. However, stamp duty affects only a few people in any given year and so is not as voter sensitive.
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