Crispin Hull

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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The United States is on a mission of sabotage. It is not satisfied merely to walk away from the Kyoto protocol on environment change, rather it wants to see it destroyed. President Bush as the democratically elected leader of the United States is well within his rights to question whether the protocol is necessarily or whether the US should join the agreement to make it legally enforceable. Presumably, the US electorate will judge him on his actions on that due course. But the US has gone beyond this.

Since President Bush announced in March, shortly after assuming the presidency, that the US would not ratify the Kyoto protocol as it stood, the US has actively done its best to ensure that countries like Canada, Japan and the Australia do not sign up. These three countries are critical to the Kyoto process. Under the Kyoto protocol 55 nations with 55 per cent of the global emissions must ratify the protocol to give it a legal force. Under the 55-55 rule the European Union and Eastern European countries cannot ago it alone. On their own they do not add up to 55 per cent of emissions nor do they add up to 55 countries. If Kyoto is to go anywhere, Japan and perhaps some other countries must join the European camp. But US pressure is strong. The Japanese, Canadian and Australian Governments are particularly subservient to whatever position the US takes in foreign-policy matters.
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The Howard Government continued pork barrelling again this week. One day after Prime Minister John Howard turned the first sod for the $1.3 billion Alice Springs-to-Darwin railway, his Minister for Defence, Peter Reith, announced that the Australian Defence Force’s new operational headquarters would go to Queanbeyan.

The decision to build the railway was flawed it from the beginning. It will always be a large white elephant and a burden on the taxpayer. The idea that it would be used to ship goods into the Asian market was fanciful. Producers of goods in that the southern part of Australia will use the cheaper and only slightly less timely sea routes, as they do now. The railway was only ever a plan to help the last remaining Liberal state government in South Australia and to help the Coalition in the fight for the two new Northern Territory seats at the next election. Hitherto, the single Northern Territory seat had always been marginal, swinging backwards and forwards from Labor to the Coalition over past 25 years. At the next election the Northern Territory will have to two seats – Solomon, based on Darwin and Lingiari, comprising and the remainder of the territory. Notionally, Solomon is a marginal coalition seat requiring a 2.4 per cent swing to fall to Labor.
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Indonesia is heading for a potentially explosive situation. The President Abdurrahman Wahid is facing impeachment hearings in Indonesia’s Parliament beginning on August 1. The impeachment is over corruption charges involving at the alleged raising and misallocation of party funds. There is no question of any personal gain on the part of Mr Wahid and a lot of the evidence appears to be quite weak. However, Mr Wahid quite reasonably fears that he will not be judged on the merits of the charges against him but rather on political matters.

As a consequence, he has been wondering aloud whether he should declare a state of emergency. He was quoted as telling a students’ forum, “I can issue a state of emergency. I have it the power to do it, but would it be a wise decision?” Alternatively, he mused, that he might merely suspend parliament in order to avoid the impeachment hearing.

This is dangerous and foolish talk and indicates a lack of hard political acumen. If Mr Wahid was even thinking such things it would have been wiser to keep them to himself.
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There have been at some encouraging signs on the Indian sub-continent in the past few days. For the first time in two years there have been high-level talks between long-time enemies India and Pakistan. Pakistan’s military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf had talks with the Indian Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee near the Taj Mahal in Agra.

It would have been too much to expect a wide-ranging, all-embracing agreement to come out of these talks. In particular, it would have been naive to imagine that there would have been agreement over the disputed territory of Kashmir. India and Pakistan have been at loggerheads over Kashmir since partition in 1947. At partition, it was understood that while initially Kashmir would be administered by India, after a couple of years there would be an act of self-determination in Kashmir to determine whether the territory would go to Pakistan or to India. The act of self-determination has never taken place. Pakistan believes that in any plebiscite the Muslim majority in Kashmir would vote to go to Pakistan. This is why India has resisted any call for a vote.

India and Pakistan have gone to war twice over the territory. An undeclared war began to years ago in northern Kashmir and there has been an uneasy ceasefire in the past seven months.
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The International Olympic Committee will announce today (Australian time) its decision on where the 2008 Olympic Games will be held. It is likely the IOC will choose Beijing. If so it will be an appalling decision.

The Olympic Games is not just another sporting event, like a swimming meeting or a football carnival. The Olympic Games by its own motto and own aspirations stands for universal human aspirations that go beyond a sporting contest. In the time of the ancient Greeks, when the first games were held, it was a time when the various cities of Greece put aside war and came together in a contest of physical and spiritual human excellence. So when the IOC makes its decision it must look beyond the mere sporting contest. It must look beyond whether the several cities seeking the right to host the Games are physically capable of holding the Games in terms of sporting venues, transport and accommodation. The IOC should also look at the spiritual fitness of the host city.

When the IOC looks at Beijing it may well conclude that despite the smog and the mediocre transport systems and sporting facilities that the Chinese regime in the next seven years will be able to create the physical infrastructure to hold the Games. But it must look beyond this. At present, and for the foreseeable future, Beijing is also the seat of government of one of the most politically repressive regimes on earth. The Chinese regime has brutally repressed the religious freedom of those who wish to embrace the Falun Gong movement. It has imprisoned and executed – – often without trial – – those who criticise it on political grounds. There are no rights of self-determination for minorities in China, particularly those who seek independence for Tibet.
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The Minister for Workplace Relations, Tony Abbott, has stirred considerable debate over poverty in Australia with comments he made on the ABC’s Four Corners program on Monday night. Mr Abbott was responding to suggestions that more people in Australia are living in poverty and that there is now a new class of working poor.

Taken sentence by sentence, what Mr Abbott had to say had a ring of truth about it. But taken together his comments gave the unfortunate impression that the government cannot eradicate poverty and therefore should not try.

Essentially, Mr Abbott’s view of the world is one in which individuals in poverty are to blame for their poverty; that they are the authors of their own misfortune. It is a very Dickensian of view of the world. It is a pessimistic one and one that minimises the role of government.
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The desertion of the member for Kennedy, Bob Katter, from the National Party probably marks the death-throes of what has been an abiding debate in Australian politics – – protectionism verses free trade. Mr Katter himself would probably proclaim himself a free trader. However, his stand as an opponent of privatisation, economic rationalism and globalisation in fact it puts him in the corner with what, at least until the election of the Howard Government, had been the National Party’s traditional protectionist position. The National Party and its predecessor the Country Party had always agreed that the Australian industry should be protected against competition from the rest of the world and the Government should subsidise services into regional and rural Australia. Also, for a long time it had supported the he the regulation of the marketing of agricultural products.

Australia and the rest of the world began deregulation, privatisation and a globalisation in the 1980s. Then, Australia had a Labor Government and the Liberal and National Party’s could attack that Government from both ends of the stick. The Liberals could rant against the big power of unions and the National Party could attack the consequences of Labor’s freeing of the financial markets and privatisation of the Commonwealth bank. However, once in government the fundamental philosophical differences between the Liberal Party and National Party could no longer be papered over. Both parts of the coalition had to support coalition policy. John Howard came to government with a committed privatisation and deregulation agenda. In the past five years that has had considerable fall-out in the bush, as unprofitable banking, public-sector, telecommunications and other services could no longer be cross subsidised under a pro-privatisation regime.
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