Crispin Hull

Zululand, Hluhluwe-Umfolozi and St Lucia: Three-day package from Durban $945.

Sabi Sabi: Three-day pacakage from Johannesburg (including flights, meals, game drives, five-star accommodation) from $1670.

Tours through Bench International 1800-221-451 www.benchinternational.com.au

Getting there: South African Airways have five flights a week Sydney-Johannesburg non-stop from around $1750. No visa.
Continue reading “2000_11_november_africafacts”

A trawl of sentencing decisions by the ACT Supreme Court in the past year shows a bizarre trend.

I sense that the judiciary in the ACT has de facto decriminalised the violent consequences of drug addiction but left the distribution and possession of drugs highly criminalised.

It seems the judiciary is handing out bonds and suspended sentences for armed robbery, assault and burglary but handing stiff sentences out to non-violent drug possessors and dealers. First-offence armed robbery offenders almost invariably get a bond, not jail, in the ACT. Indeed, the middle-aged speedster or drink-driver at least cops some real penalty of fine and suspension of licence.

I have just trawled the 45 Supreme Court sentencings in the past year covered by The Canberra Times. We cover a large portion of them, and in any event a good cross-section. The table shows the results.
Continue reading “2000_11_november_act jailings”

Virtually every organisation has them, these days. They are variously called mission statements, statements of values or goals.

The banks are very good at them. You see the statements at the counter. Often they have woolly words like customer-focus, best possible service, corporate good-citizenship and so on.

Political parties are even better at them. Party platforms talk in even bolder terms about working for a better Australia, to have values of decency, to strive for honesty and openness, to work for a modern economy while ensuring that those less fortunate have equal opportunity and so on.
Continue reading “2000_10_october_survivial carnell etc”

The ACT is a unique polity. We are still working out the rules. Even now one should not assume that Labor’s Jon Stanhope will be Chief Minister next Wednesday.

In the ACT, we have fixed terms. It means the election is held on the third Saturday in October every three years. We do not have a Governor, Administrator or Governor-General who takes the advice of the Chief Minister/Premier/Prime Minister to call an early election or to call upon someone else to form a government. So, much as she would like to, Chief Minister Kate Carnell, cannot call and early election. And without an election she is doomed.

The ACT system is more democratic, self-executing and certain. The ACT works on the principal that the people’s representatives who have been elected to the Legislative Assembly elect one of their number to be Chief Minister and that that Chief Minister selects four others to be Ministers. If there is a successful no-confidence motion in the Chief Minister, the Assembly must elect one of its members as Chief Minister in a secret ballot.
Continue reading “2000_10_october_stanhope”

It is all about bums on seats.

This week the South Australian Auditor-General brought down a damning report on the plan by John Olsen’s Liberal Government to build a big stadium ostensibly to put bums on seats for Olympics soccer but incidentally to do favours to sundry construction and sporting interests who in turn would say, do and pay for nice things for the Liberal Party so it would have a better chance to gets its bums on seats in Parliament. Pity the long suffering South Australian taxpayer.

The story is familiar, except the ACT lost one Minister in the face of an Opposition and cross-bench with the numbers on the floor of Parliament; South Australia lost two: Tourism Minister Joan Hall and Cabinet Secretary Graham Ingerson.
Continue reading “2000_10_october_stadium forum”

It is all very well the Coalition saying it will sell Telstra, but it needs legislation and therefore the approval of the Senate.

Labor and the Democrats will block it in the Senate, just as they have blocked other critical legislation in the past six years and just as the Coalition blocked Labor legislation with Democrat help before that.

The Senate looks a pretty bleak prospect for the Coalition this election. Senators coming up this election were elected in 1996, the year of the Coalition landslide. The Coalition is defending a very good result, so it is bound to lose some seats. More of that anon.
Continue reading “2000_10_october_senate for forum”

The politicians, particularly in the Coalition, are at it again … one law for them and their mates and another law for everyone else.

This time it is privacy. The Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee reported last week on the Government’s new privacy legislation. The much-delayed election promise was introduced as the Privacy Amendment (Private Sector) Bill in April.

In theory, it will apply to the private sector the privacy principles that have applied to the public sector since 1988. Great. Admittedly, the Commonwealth has big constitutional problems in applying privacy principles across Australia. It has no general power to make enforceable rights and remedies on privacy.
Continue reading “2000_10_october_privacy for forum”

It is every international traveller’s nightmare – being caught innocently coming into the country with someone else’s illicit white powder. Well and it happened to me – in a sort of a way — last year.

I was coming back from Papua New Guinea after staying at Ambua Lodge, near Tari, in the Highlands. A pin in the centre of the PNG map finds Tari. One day one of the guides asked me if I would mind taking a letter to a friend of his in Australia because the PNG postal system was so bad. No problem. On the day I left, a lodge mini-bus took us along the hellish Highlands “”Highway” the 23kms back to the airport. It takes an hour and half. At the airport “”waiting lounge” – a patch of fenced-in grass 10 metres by 10 metres, the driver gave me the letter, which in fact was a small package. I am acutely aware of the dangers of carrying other people’s packages across international borders, but it was too late to send it back. It would seem so ungrateful to the guide who had shown me much. I decided to take the package and declare it at Sydney.

Quarantine opened the package in my presence. To my absolute horror it contained a sachet of white powder.
Continue reading “2000_10_october_png orchids”

ACT Labor’s announcement to limit dual-occupancy developments will have residents and developers scurrying to the large suburban maps issued by the planning authorities.

Labor is to limit dual occupancies to 5 per cent of the blocks in any suburban section for all suburbs across Canberra until neighbourhood plans are developed after the election. It has opened a divide between the major parties on urban development. Hitherto Tweedledeedee and Tweedledeedum were adherents of developer-driven “”planning”.

Beware, though, Labor’s 5 per cent limit is only a temporary measure. If they attain Government, who knows what the neighbourhood plans might bring.
Continue reading “2000_10_october_planning oped”