Crispin Hull

It began to drizzle when I arrived in Chiltern on Tuesday morning. My sister, Deborah, arrived from Melbourne at the same time and we met our younger brother, Simon, at the gate of my mother’s house.

“”It’s okay,” said Simon, “I’ve told her we’re going to Yarrawonga to get a dog.”

Me: “”You did what? What the hell did you tell her that for?”

Deborah: “”We can’t do that. We’ll have to tell her.”

But Simon had spent two nights a week with my mother for some years. He was right. But since when did older siblings take notice of the youngest.

Deborah, turning to Mum: “”Mum, Simon is going to Western Australia for a little time. He needs a holiday. We’re going to take you to Yarrawonga, just for a few days to see if you like it.”

Mum: “”I’m not going anywhere. I’m not spending a night anywhere but in my own house.”

Simon in an aside to me: “”Don’t worry, she’ll forget and we can start again with the dog. Don’t worry.”

Mum to me: “”You were here before weren’t you? You had glasses on.”

Me: “”No, Mum, I don’t wear glasses. I was here a couple of months ago.” (She recognised me then.)

Mum: “”When were you last here? You were here with glasses.”

Simon: “”Crispin doesn’t wear glasses.”

Mum: “”I’m not going anywhere.”

Deborah: “”Okay, let’s have some coffee.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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This week the Federal Government will find itself squeezed between a Labor-Democrat majority in the Senate and the interests of the commercial television broadcasters, notably those of Australia’s richest man, Kerry Packer. The Government’s plan for digital television will go before the Senate. This plan, unlike the GST, is not part of any specific electoral mandate. Labor and the Democrats are well within their rights to propose amendments to the plan. It is a deeply flawed plan for the use of the vastly increased extra capacity that comes with digital broadcasting. Technically, it would enable the existing broadcasters to each put out several different program streams in place of the single one that each puts out now. It would also enable datacasting which would put permanent on-line internet facilities into the home which could include video on demand and live programs for a full range of educational and entertainment products.

The Government, however, proposes to restrict the existing five broadcasters (three commercials, the ABC and SBS) to a single stream of programming. They would use the extra digital facility to be taken up by high-definition broadcasts of the single program stream so good that people could have an image the size of a wall if they could afford the receiving set.

This suits the commercial broadcasters. They do not want any extra competition or erosion of market share. Nor do they want to waste money on extra programming streams if they can capture their advertising recipients in a single program stream.
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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.
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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.
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