Crispin Hull

Dr Kerryn Phelps was elected as President of the Australian Medical Association on May 28, last year.

Between May 24 and June 6 this year, the Minister for Health Michael Wooldridge, made several statements which were reported on ABC Radio and various newspapers over whether certain drugs are being over prescribed , the extent to which the public should subsidise those drugs, and other medical matters.

On one occasion he said, “The majority of medical opinion is not with Dr Phelps, whose only qualification is in the media, not in any sort of specialist medical area. She is wrong on this.”

The radio interviewer pointed out that Dr Phelps was a qualified doctor, and Dr Wooldridge agreed. But he added that Dr Phelps disagrees with an independent scientific expert committee and “she is spreading dangerous information that will worry people unnecessarily and she should be condemned for it.”

After those statements were made, Dr Phelps continued in her position as President of the Australian Medical Association for all the world to see. Her certificate of graduation from the University of Sydney medical school is obvious verification of the statement made on the AMA is internet site and inferred on all AMA public statements that Dr Phelps is indeed a qualified medical practitioner as well as being a media medical personality.
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Here we go again. That would be at the average person’s reaction to the slanging match between Prime Minister John Howard and Opposition Leader Kim Beazley this week.

Howard said, “The Opposition Leader must deliver clear Yes or No answers. The time for slithering and sliding, chameleon-like, according to the audience he is addressing, is over.”

And Beazley’s said, “[Howard] has been all over the place like a fruit bat over the course of the last six months, ladling money out to try and defend his political hopes.”

But far from worrying about degeneration into slanging matches, we should welcome these two epithets for the valuable understanding they give to the state of politics in Australia. They are deadly accurate descriptions of each leader. Taken together they provide a far more insight than the usual waffle and humbug.

Let us take the fruit bat first. The fruit uses echolocation. It is the use of short high-frequency sound pulses. These reflect from objects in the vicinity and enable the bat to either to home in (and devour) the object or to avoid crashing into the object. So when one sees a fruit bat in the evening sky it appears to fly a in a haphazard way. In fact, it is not flying haphazardly and rather it is flying in a highly directed way to avoid collision and it to move to where it can pickup sustenance. Echolocation describes quite accurately how the modern political operative works. Bounce an idea out and see what comes back. Depending on what comes back, you home in or avoid. How better to describe Howard? There is no leadership and no risk in echolocation.
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How refreshing it is to see one of the major political parties put out some detailed policy several months before an election. Deputy Labor leader Ted Quinlan issued a statement this week giving details of Labor’s rates policy should it attain office at the October election. The policy was not some motherhood waffle, rather it contained some new and interesting proposals. This is how politics should be. It will enable Labor’s political opponents, the media and the community at large to debate the proposals which in turn is likely to improve them.

Labor hit upon two salient points. First, rate rises are often erratic across the city. Secondly, large rises in property values in some suburbs can result in rate rises too large for some residents to bear. These are not new problems. Indeed, they plagued the the Carnell Government in the late 1990s. It had promised not to increase the total rates take by more than the consumer price index. It was greeted with howls of protest when residents in some suburbs were hit with larger-than-CPI increases while other suburbs had decreases. The Government sensibly introduced a system of a rolling three-year average. This ironed out some of the more glaring glitches but did not address the more fundamental trend – – namely that the value of land in the inner south and inner north has been rising at a far greater rate than the value of land elsewhere in Canberra. The Government attempted to address this by introducing a fixed-charge component of the rates bill, so that the total rates bill is less dependent on average unimproved values of land.
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Today it is the last day of the Governor-Generalship of Sir William Deane. He has been, to borrow the words of Gilbert and Sullivan, the very model of a modern governor-general. He was like many of his predecessors, a man of law. The law, politics and the military have provided the vast majority of Australia’s Governors-General. Unlike most of his predecessors, he bought a great deal of humanity and spirit to the job.

In it his five-and-a-half years he went well beyond the official and ceremonial tasks that make up the bulk of the job specification of Governor-General. In a many ways he represented the national conscience. He was a champion of the disadvantaged. Without fuss he helped the homeless, the disadvantaged, indigenous people, the poor, sick children and a host of charities. He was at his best as representative of the nation in a time of tragedy. It was at his instigation — not the Government’s – – that the first memorial and grief service for the Port Arthur victims was held it in Canberra. He followed it by assuming the role of national chief mourner after the Black Hawk helicopter crash, the Thredbo landslide, the Childers backpacker hostel fire and in 1999 personally going to Interlaken in Switzerland for a ceremony for the Australians killed in the canyoning disaster. On that occasion he personally picked 14 it sprigs of wattle from his Yarralumla gardens to give it to relatives to throw into the Saxetenbach Gorge. When the two CARE Australia workers were jailed in Yugoslavia he tied yellow and green ribbons to the balustrade at Yarralumla.

He did these things in addition to the usual and diarised ceremonies on Anzac Day, Remembrance Day, a Australia Day and the Queen’s birthday. It was the former additional things that made his Governor-Generalship so unique.
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Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid took considerable risks in coming into Australia. Mr Wahid faces an impeachment hearing in six weeks’ time. His political opponents in Indonesia have tried to get some mileage out of his absence from the country, arguing that he should be dealing with problems at home or rather than undertaking yet another of his many overseas trips – – particularly to Australia, the country that had so many troops in Timor in 1999.

It must be borne in mind also that the Australian that Prime Minister, John Howard, faces an election at the end of this year. In these circumstances it would be easy to dismiss President Wahid’s trip as merely symbolic and not of any lasting and value. However, it appears that the risk taken by Mr Wahid was worth taking because it is unlikely that the trip will affect the outcome of the hearing in any event and it appears that the trip has achieved quite a deal for both Australia and Indonesia.

The trip went well beyond the symbolic. There was a commitment to further visits by the President of Indonesia, whoever it might be, and the Prime Minister of Australia, whoever that might be. This was a clear sign by both leaders to move away from situation where the relationship between the two neighbours becomes dependent upon the personal relationship between their leaders. This will certainly put vice-president Megawati on the spot should it she succeed Mr Wahid in August. There will be some pressure on her to keep the momentum up for improving Indonesian-Australian relations. Without the Wahid visit she could have continued her fairly cool attitude to Australia without undue questioning. On the Australian side, both of Mr Howard’s likely successors – – Peter Costello or Kim Beazley – – will want to continue to improve relations with the Indonesia.
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Prime Minister John Howard has been in the Parliament for 27 years. He knows better than anyone that the House of Representatives has been dominated by the two major parties for more than 70 years. Few independents ever get elected. At present at the House contains just one Member who was elected as an independent and one other member who was elected as a Labor Member and resigned from the party to become an independent. Mr Howard knows better than most that virtually every vote taken in the House of Representatives is taken with each of the major parties holding to a particular position and against which they will brook no dissent. He knows also that the major issues facing Australia today that are debated in the House are ones of broad national concern – – things like education, health, tax, the environment and interest rates.

It was perplexing then to hear him at the weekend talking about the Aston by-election scheduled for July 14th. He did not suggest that the electors of Aston should vote for the Coalition candidate because the Coalition offered the best program for Australia nationally. rather, he treated us, at the Coalition’s official launch of the Aston campaign, to an analysis which had more relevance to 18th century Britain than to modern Australian political reality.
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Nato is treading a very fine line in Macedonia. It probably has to. Nonetheless its response this week carries as many dangers as solutions. It has agreed to send in a contingent of peacekeeping troops up to 5000 strong. However, the sending of the troops is conditional the secretary general of Nato, George Robinson said, “It will happen when, and only when, this is a durable ceasefire and an agreement between all of the party’s in the [Macedonian Government] coalition and indeed an agreement by the armed extremists that they will proceed towards disarmament.”

The Nato position was arrived at after a plea from Macedonia’s President Boris Trajkovski. Mr Trajkovski called for help in taking arms from those rebels who wanted to hand them over. Secretary General Robinson said, “This is not an armed intervention. It will be a force appropriate to the task in benign conditions.”

One might well ask that if the situation in Macedonia got to a state that it fulfilled all of Nato’s conditions whether there would be any need for a Nato force to go in at all. To satisfy the Nato conditions, there would have to be a durable ceasefire based on an agreement that embraced a constitutional and political settlement between it the ethnic Albanian minority and at the Slav majority. In those conditions, who would need anyone to go around and pick up a few surrendered weapons?
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It is easy to feel sympathy for Netball Australia. The organisation feels it that it is under legal siege. It feels that it is a damned if it does and damned if it does not. If it does nothing to prevent pregnant women from playing netball in matches that it organises, and as a result a fetus is born with injuries, Netball Australia could be held liable for damages. On the other hand, if it bans pregnant women from playing, it will be found to be in breach of the Sex Discrimination Act.

This week, Netball Australia decided that it would be less costly to be in breach of the Sex Discrimination Act than to be liable for injuries to a fetus. It therefore decided to ban pregnant women from playing in games that it organised. Netball Australia argued that it was not possible for a woman to indemnify Netball Australia against injury to a fetus because, once born, the fetus is a separate legal entity which can sue in its own right. Netball Australia and also argued that immediate action was needed.

The decision has caused outrage among the players, the medical profession and it human rights groups.

The decision could have ramifications for other sports and possibly for the participation of pregnant women in parts of the workforce. That being the case the decision should be subjected to a high level of scrutiny.
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The Australian government’s policy on the detention of refugees is a disgrace verging on the inhuman. This week an all-party parliamentary committee reported on the policy. They found some asylum seekers are cooped up in filthy cells with overflowing toilets. They found asylum-seekers spending months in detention centres with nothing to do. They were left wandering aimlessly through the camp. At night they were checked by torchlight. At Port Hedland the committee said conditions were, “horrendous” and “disgraceful”. Detention centre staff had even tried to prevent MPs from seeing one block – – clearly they had something to hide.

These are not the findings of some of politically motivated group. Nor are they the findings of some pro-migrant or pro-refugee organisation. Rather, they are the findings of a parliamentary committee containing both Government and Opposition MPs. The recommendations and findings they made were unanimous.

But the minister for immigration, Philip Ruddock, and Prime Minister John Howard could barely have had time to skim through the report before they came out rejecting its key findings and recommendations. Clearly, their minds had been made up that there were more votes in the detention of asylum-seekers than applying decency and humanity to fellow human beings.
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The Coalition majority on the parliamentary committee on electoral matters has a recommended tightening of enrolment procedures for the electoral roll. It says people enrolling or changing enrolment details (like address) should provide some from of identification. That recommendation – like a lot of new regulation – will impose a burden on the many because of the malfeasance of a few.

Prime Minister John Howard argued that one has to provide identification in order to hire a video, so why not to enrol to vote? However, the analogy soon falls down. The main reason videos stores require identification is because without it so many videos would be stolen. Similarly with underage drinking; without ID those under 18 would obtain alcohol. But that is not the case with respect to the Australian voting system. Evidence given to the committee by the Australian Electoral Commission stated that there was no case in Australian electoral history where an election of any individual member was affected by impersonation or fraudulent enrolment. In short, there is no mischief or malfeasance to be attended to (unlike the video-store or underage drinking situations). There is simply no need to impose a system of identification.

At least the committee had the good sense not to recommend also that people should show identification at the polling place when voting. That would unnecessarily add to voting time. Once again, the Electoral Commission says there is no case of ther esult of an election being affected by double voters. Instead the committee suggested that sex and date of birth be put on the roll. That simple step would prevent and deter a lot of impersonation, because any impersonator would risk impersonating someone they are obviously not.\
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