Crispin Hull

The plight of employees of the failed OneTel company illustrates the need for action by the Federal Governments to improve the state of corporate governance in Australia. It is unacceptable that quite low-paid workers should have to queue up with a large-scale trade creditors in order to get some of their entitlements in the winding up of the company.

It is made more unacceptable by the fact that this is not an isolated incident. Last year when National Textiles went belly up with 300 employees owed about $11 million, politicians from all sides acknowledged the need to reform corporations law and to set up under government schemes to ensure there was no repeat. In that that case, the Federal and NSW Governments did a one-off bale out. As it happened, the Prime Minister’s brother, Stan Howard, was a key figure in at the management of National Textiles. On a charitable interpretation, the Federal Government showed concern for national textiles employees by organising the bale-out. Given the conduct of the Federal Government since then, it seems that its concern for employees was short lived. There have been several other company collapses with employees owed substantial sums of money and the government has done little.
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Opposition Leader Kim Beazley has begun to gives some details of his party’s industrial-relations policy. They are not very encouraging. Ideology taints industrial relations like no other policy area in Australia. On one hand, the Coalition sides with employers and goes out of its way to destroy any role for unions in the workplace. On the other hand, Labor panders far too much to large unions and their peak body, the Australian Council of Trade Unions.

In the past four years, the most draconian elements of Coalition policy have been ameliorated in the Senate by the Australian Democrats. The result has been a worthwhile shift in industrial relations law in Australia. Industrial relations are now conducted with a focus on the workplace, rather than on an industry-wide basis. In addition, those employees who wish it can take up individual Australian Workplace Agreements. As a result of Democrat insistence, however, unions still have a role in negotiating at a workplace level for those employees who wish it. Workplace Relations Minister Peter Reith is impatient at the pace of change, but it is happening and the result has been beneficial: more flexible arrangements which suit individual workplaces, fewer wildcat strikes and increases in wages as workers share some of the spoils of increased efficiency.
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The leader of the ACT Opposition, John Stanhope, has announced that his party is opposed to the Government’s $27 million free school bus plan. That is a reasonable policy decision to make. Labor had obviously come to the conclusion that a free bus scheme that applied to children travelling more than a certain distance after-school favoured people going to private schools because by and large those going to government schools tend to attend the closest government school and therefore do not qualify for the free bus. Further, Labor argues that the money would be better spent more directly on education, on such things as reducing class sizes, increasing school facilities and providing textbooks and the like.

Leaving aside for the moment Mr Stanhope’s earlier statement that he would not make any new policy statements until closer to the election, Labor’s promise to scrap the free bus scheme if it comes to office is a sensible position to put at the next election.

However, to go the next step and state that the party will attempt to prevent the scheme getting off the ground when the Budget comes before the Legislative Assembly is another matter. That step would require an amendment to the Appropriation Bill, specifically prohibiting spending on a free buses and that would get the Opposition and crossbenchers into logical and legislative difficulties. Then might even be forced to legislate for compulsory bus fares as it is difficult to see how they can legislate to prohibit the Government from providing a free service.
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Industrial Relations Minister Peter Reith was crowing last week.

The High Court had just ruled that a key provision of his Workplace Relations Act was valid. It was a “”crushing blow” for the unions, he crowed. The provision was his award-stripping initiative.

It was typical of the testosterone-charged, win-lose mentality that characterises Australian industrial relations. Indeed, Reith’s reaction was exactly the opposite of the mentality that employers want to engender in the workplace. Employers want win-win arrangements. They want to remove the us-and-them mentality. True, they also want, quite reasonably, to end monopoly union power in the workplace, but it is no good replacing that with a let’s-crush-the-workers attitude. Crushing workers crushes business.

While Reith was greeting last week’s decision like a supporter of a winning Aussie rules team at siren time, employer groups were a little more subdued, but probably for the wrong reason, as we shall see. Even so, last week’s case will still put a bit of a dampener on Reith’s award-stripping project for other reasons, as we shall see.
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The feathers of the legal profession and judiciary have been ruffled in the past fortnight after the realisation that any juror can hop on to the CrimeNet site of the internet to see if the accused they are trying has a criminal record.

A Victorian Supreme Court judge aborted a murder trial because of the site. Defence counsel cited the fact that the site contained incorrect information on his client. The Victorian Attorney-General, Rob Hulls, threatened the site’s managing director, Ken Schultz, with prosecution for contempt of court and called for the site to be closed down.

Mr Schultz, who does not live in Victoria, told Mr Hulls to go jump. He pointed out that all in the information on his site was available to the public. And it is, but other than on Mr Schultz’s site it is difficult to get at because it is in paper version in libraries, or expensive because it is on subscription-based newspaper databases. Some of it is available on court records and other parts of the data are available on semi-official court internet sites.
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TWO phrases — “innocent until proved guilty” and “trial by media” — have been used frequently in discussion about allegations of sexual assault against the chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, Geoff Clark.

Unfortunately, the phrases have distorted rather than to clarified.

At the outset, I should make clear that I am making no judgment about the veracity of the allegations. Readers should look at and the original article in the Age, Melbourne, last Saturday and make their own judgment. Rather, I make general comment.

One way to clarify the questions is to look at the way the burden of proof applies. The phrase “innocent until proved guilty” should apply only to the criminal law. The presumption of innocence puts a high burden on those who seek a criminal conviction. They have to unprove your innocence by convincing a judge, magistrate or jury beyond reasonable doubt that you are guilty. Upon that proof you are convicted and face a penalty, including imprisonment. Conviction and imprisonment are dire consequences and therefore require this very heavy burden of proof before they are imposed.
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A butterfly flaps its wings in Peru and Cairns has a summer of devastating floods. This is chaos theory. It happens with weather, and it happens also with electoral systems. There have been some good examples in recent times: the fall-out from last year’s election in Fiji; on-going strife in Papua New Guinea; the tussle over the seat over the federal seat of Hume; and earlier we had the Thatcher and New Zealand experiments.

An Australian Parliamentary Library paper published shortly after last year’s Fijian election shows how the new electoral system in the new 1998 Constitution laid the groundwork for this year’s coup. The new Constitution imposed Australian-style preferential voting. There were also 23 reserved indigenous and 19 reserved Indian seats to ensure some ethnic balance. It was done with the best will in the world. In theory it would weaken racially-based parties and help develop a two-party (or at least two-coalition) system. It was thought that the preferential system would allow an exchange of preferences between the SVT party led by the 1987 coup leader and Prime Minister, Sitiveni Rabuka, and the National Federation Party, the predominant Indian party. The Federation Party pleaded for co-operation, despite the coups.
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Last week Liberal Party MP Christopher Pyne was warmly congratulated by a his colleagues after delivering his kick in the guts for the Labor Party through the report into the integrity of the electoral roll.

In the long term, though, the Liberals might rue the day.

The setting up of the inquiry by the joint parliamentary committee on electoral matters was from the outset and exercise in embarrassing Labor. The inquiry was spawned by an earlier inquiry by Tom Shepherdson, QC, in Queensland. Shepherdson looked at Labor’s pre-selection rorts. Labor had been caught because it had earlier attempted to clean up branch-stacking by using the Commonwealth electoral roll as a new “clean” verification procedure for people voting in party pre-selection ballots to ensure they lived in the electorate. Alas for Labor, it did not anticipate the determination of rorters who then put outside people on the Commonwealth electoral roll fraudulently so that they could still rig pre-selection ballots. The Shepherdson inquiry exposed them.

This in turn led the federal government to opportunistically set-up of the inquiry that was headed by Mr Pyne. The Pyne inquiry would keep the matter of a Labour Party electoral skulduggery in the public eye for as long as possible. The coalition had not got much mileage out of the Shepherdson inquiry at the time because of the politically astute dealing with it by Queensland Premier Peter Beattie.
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This weekend, a matter as profound as the GST will be decided by the Australian Democrats. The have a choice. They either agreed to give Australians an entrée into the digital world of interactive information and entertainment on demand or to leave the nation in a digital backwater.

It is an immense decision. They must gather the courage to throw out the Government’s digital broadcasting legislation when it comes before the Senate on Monday. Unlike the GST it was not taken through an election. Unlike the GST it has no redeeming features.

The choice is stark. Under the Government’s plan we use the huge resource of new digital spectrum to present precious little more than we get already except it will be delivered (for those who can afford the new television sets) in stunning cinema-quality clarity. We would get the existing five services (three commercial, SBS and the ABC) in high definition that would enable you to put the existing TV programs on at a cinema. It is really mega-high-definition.
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Australian defamation law has been held up to a fair amount of a hatred ridicule and contempt this month. Ten days ago the chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, Geoff Clark, announced that he would not sue the Fairfax newspapers over very detailed allegations they published asserting that he had sexually assaulted four women in the 1970s and 1980s. He said it that his legal advice was that the trial would take between 12 and 18 months in preparation and take between four and eight weeks in court.

“I am that further advised it would be unwise for me to immediately retaliate to the gross libel by issuing legal proceedings unless I am prepared to suffer the considerable financial consequences of a legal war of attrition,” he said.

The Age reporter Andrew Rule responded by saying, “I think it’s code for I’m not going to sue because it’s too risky to do so. We here regard it as confirming our case.”
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