Crispin Hull

When Dr Paul Hogan got a court award a couple of weeks ago of $2.9 million for being belted over the hand with a strap, the cry went up that Australia was going the way of the US.

Well, I was in the US at the time, otherwise I would have hopped on my hobby horse (the madness of juries) last week.

In some ways we are going the way the of the US. Meanwhile, some legislatures in the US have had enough of overblown awards to plaintiffs and are gong the other way.

Since the strapping case, the letters and talk back have been filled with ex-students talking about how beatings made men of them or how corporal punishment leaves psychological scars forever. Of equal import, however, is the question of whether juries should be allowed near the courts of justice.

Te jury had obviously seen too many episodes of LA Law and the The Practise (yes Americans spell it like that). In these programs, over-acting lawyers play it up to juries to give humungous awards to plaintiffs to “”send messages” and to respond to “”emotional” needs and so on, irrespective of the justice of the case or the fall-out for the public who have to pay, usually in the form of higher insurance policies or higher prices.
Continue reading “2001_02_february_jury strapping”

Beaver Run in Breckenridge Beaver Run Resort, Breckenridge Ph: 970 453 6000

Tuesday Wednesday Feb. 13-14

East/West Resorts in Beaver Creek. Check-in at Highlands Lodge. : 970 949 5071

Thursday, Feb. 15

Vail

Friday, Saturday, Feb. 16, 17

Denver Westin Tabor Center.

Sunday Monday, Feb. 17, 18

Denver Brown Palace Hotel
Continue reading “2001_02_february_itin. kill later”

THE tussle of wills this week between Prime Minister John Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello was eerily similar to that between Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Treasurer Paul Keating.

Costello, like Keating, has (to use Keating’s phrase) his head down and bum in the air working on tax detail. Meanwhile, (again to use Keating’s phrase) Howard is out there tripping on television cables at shopping centres.

Costello seems to be suffering the same frustration as Keating. His leader is ready to undo his work at the slightest, transitory, popular backlash.

On the Business Activity statement this week, Costello defied Howard, at least initially.

Costello wants an efficient tax system and efficient small businesses. It means upsetting a lot of small businesses who have run their accounts out of a shoebox and slopped cash about without paying proper tax.
Continue reading “2001_02_february_howard v costello”

Labor’s move this week to amend digital television and datacasting laws is worse than closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Because Labor provided the bullet to shoot the horse.

The horse is the fantastic opportunities that should have been available to Australians with the digital tweaking of the available spectrum. It could have, and should have, provided for five networks (the ABC, SBS and the three commercials) to have up to four programming signals each of standard digital definition, and perhaps half a dozen datacasters to provide (over the airwaves) super Internet services which would have included video quality services.

But no, the Government bowed to commcerial television interests. It canned the idea of any of the present networks offering four standard definition programs and instead ordered that all five netowrks must burn up all their spectrum in offering one high-definition signal (with a few add-ons so you can see the same sport from several angles and some extra text searching). This is good for the commercials because all their audience is concentrated, as now, into one programming and one advertising stream which is much cheaper and easier to deliver than four program streams of standard definition.
Continue reading “2001_02_february_digital labor”

It was sad to see a whole nation prostrate itself in adulation of a man who could hit a round piece of leather with a piece of wood.

Sure, he hit it very well. Better than anyone else, no doubt. But really, is this good cause for using phrases like “”the greatest Australian”, for stopping the national Parliament, for devoting more than half the night’s television news bulletins, for wrapping every newspaper in the country with pages and pages of tributes and so on?

And in all these hectares of words, there were precious few from the man himself. He did not contribute much to the great debates, at least publicly.

The adulation is puzzling. It is more than 50 years since he played a test match. That was pre-television, so there is not much vision of his performance. Sure, Bradman lifted the spirits of a few people during the Depression with his sporting prowess. Circuses and dance halls did the same thing.
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Bollards at Dairy flat.

Mid path bars on unlit path.. dings in every one of them. Then put reflector tape on them – more or less acknowledging they are a danger.

Path runs out.

Hospice.

Shclich Street maze. Too busy negotiating the maze to see traffic.

Crossing to boat shores – all should be zebra crossings with give way to pedestrians and cyclists. (it is not holding up traffic cos going to lake shore 25kms anyway and the danger is acknowledged by humps.
Continue reading “2001_02_february_bike paths”

Plane crash (in Canberra) kills four, the banner headline read in 27mm-high type on Monday. Underneath was a piocture that ran across the page. In the bottom right in type 4mm high rant he headline, “”Indian quake toll rises to 15,000”.

It invites the comment that The Canberra Times thinks that one dead Canberrans is equal to about 4000 dead Indians. But, for a change, we were not innundated with that comment.

I hope it is not because readers have given up caring to make comments about the paper. I suspect not because readers were quick to point out the misspelling of practice (noun), the “”your” instead of “”you’re” in the cartoon and so on.

Rather, I hope that the conclusion was not drawn because it was not warranted. For a start the tragic Indian earthquake had been the main article on Page 1 on Saturday, the biggest circulation day, when the death toll was still in the hundreds. So the samller items on Sunday and Monday were follow-ups, up-dating the toll. However horrible an event, as time goes on, its impact lessens. It is not as newsworthy so gets less prominence.
Continue reading “2001_02_february_addendum3 quake toll”

Mal Meninga’s entrance into the local political fray invites a look at what might happen at the election due in October and some unintended weakness of the ACT’s version of the Hare-Clarke electoral system.

The ACT has three electorates: Molonglo (in the centre) with seven members; Brindabella (based on Tuggernaong) with 5 and Ginninderra (based on Belconnen) with 5.

The seven-member seat has a quota of 12.5 per cent (one-eighth of the vote). It means if you get 1.5 per cent of the first preference vote you get elected. Meninga is standing in Molonglo. In the two five-member seats the quota is 16.6 per cent one sixth of the vote). It means if you get 16.6 per cent of the first preference vote you get a seat.

In fact, minor-party candidates and independents rarely get a quota on first preference votes. Successful minor candidates (by minors I mena independents and minor parties) usually require preferences from eliminated candidates – both minors and major-party canidates. Bear in mind the majors always stand a full complement of five or seven in each seat and only two or three are successful.
Continue reading “2001_02_february_act vote oped”

Changed policy on Indonesia and East Timor would cost Australia dearly, according to a former Ambassador to Indonesia, Richard Woolcott.

Mr Woolcott cited several costs. Much of the recently announced defence spending of $23 billion could be put down to the changed landscape – money that could otherwise have been spent on health, education and scientific research, he said. Australian would have to renegotiate the Timor Gap treaty with respect to oil and other resources. This could be very costly.

Australia would have to spend are large amount supporting an independent Eat Timor. Australia had already spent $4 billion on the INTERFET and UNTAET mission to East Timor.

Our standing with South-East Asian neighbours had been adversely affected with Australia now shut out of a number of regional security and economic groupings.
Continue reading “2001_01_january_woolcott”

It has been a fairly good Christmas-New Year on the roads this season, comparatively speaking.

What! Surely, there has been “”carnage” on the roads. It has been horrific, etc.

Well, perception is different from reality. In recent years about 1900 people die on the roads in Australia each year. That is an average of 5.2 per day. The holiday period runs for 17 days from the first minute of December 24 till the last minute of January 9 – this Tuesday at midnight.

At time of writing it is Friday evening 13 days in. We should have had 68 dead, on average. We had had 70. This is the same as the ordinary death rate. Yet this was at Christmas-New Year when everyone is travelling great distances away from home or driving around half tanked. If you take NSW out of the equation, every state and territory had lower per-day death rates on the roads over the Christmas-New Year holiday than during the year as a whole.
Continue reading “2001_01_january_road toll forum”