Crispin Hull

If the Government’s Budget is defeated, it can carry on for a short time under the Treasurer’s advance from the previous year.

The likelihood is, though, that Chief Minister Kate Carnell would resign. She and Treasurer Gary Humphries have indicated that the Government would stand or fall on the Budget.

If the Chief Minister resigns, the Assembly must elect a new Chief Minister before any other business.

Usually, if a Budget were defeated, the same numbers that defeated the Budget would be used to install the Opposition as Government, with Jon Stanhope becoming Chief Minister.

But the present situation is not usual. If the Budget goes down it would be solely because independents Dave Rugendyke and Paul Osborne object to funding for the heroin injecting room. But that is being provided because a majority of the Assembly has approved legislation for the injecting room. But on the question of who should be Chief Minister, they might still prefer Mrs Carnell and a Liberal Government, especially as Mr Stanhope supports the injecting room as does all his party. (Only some of the Liberals do.)
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The system of governance in the Act continues to evolve. It would be silly to expect the dogma of the Westminster system to apply unamended to a hybrid constitutional set-up like ours.

Opposition Leader Jon Stanhope has called on Chief Minister Kate Carnell to resign following the defeat of her Budget in the Assembly early yesterday morning. The usual Westminster convention is that if the Budget is defeated on the floor of Parliament (the Lower House in bicameral systems) the Government should go. That would hold in Britain, Canada, New Zealand and most Australian states. The ACT is different. It has, in effect, a detailed written constitution, in the form of the Self-Government Act, an Act of the Federal Parliament. It lays out the rules on the making or breaking of government.

The single most important difference between the ACT and other Westminster systems is that we do not have a figurehead – a Governor, Governor-General, monarch or ceremonial president. In other Westminster systems the figurehead has evolved from the ancient principle of the divine right of kings. The king claims divine right to rule through the hereditary system and allows an elected Parliament to make law. Notionally the Prime (or Chief) Minister needs formal permission of the figurehead to dissolve Parliament and hold election or to call Parliament into session. The figurehead appoints and dismisses the Prime (Chief) Minister and signs passed Bills into law.
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Every line, line by line of the Budget was approved by the Legislative Assembly going into the early hours of yesterday morning. But when it came to voting the Budget as a whole into law it was voted down.

The trouble was that differently composed majorities voted for different lines and no majority held for the whole.

Should the Chief Minister resign or be sacked if she won’t?

The answer to that question lies in the fact that, strictly speaking, the ACT does not have a Westminster system of Government. Rather it has a detailed written constitution in the form of the Self-Government Act, an Act of the Federal Parliament. It does not provide for a figurehead — Governor-General, President, King, Governor or an Administrator — to preside over such impasses, unlike in the states or federally. Rather it provides for self-executing procedures to obviate that need. It was probably done to save money rather than to chart new constitutional waters.
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This week saw the great tax spat. It began with the Labor Party in difficulty over the merest hint of a slight suggestion that it could it possibly leave itself open to looking at increasing some taxes at some it indeterminate period in the future. This was followed by an utter denial by Labour leader Kim Beazley that Labor would increase any tax ever. And that was followed by Prime Minister John Howard matching the promise with one of his own that the coalition would never increase taxes – – to be later qualified, it would seem, as not increasing any core taxes. This was accompanied with that the bombastic claims by Howard that his tax cuts that came with the GST were greater as a percentage of GDP than those given by President Bush in the United States.

It was only so much humbug by two political parties that over the past several decades have engaged in a charade of allowing inflation to silently increase taxes for them and then to grandstand with false generosity by making much of winding back the silent tax rises by calling them tax cuts.

The present government has engaged in even worse humbug by imposing higher indirect taxes in the form of a GST and pretending to more than compensate by giving “cuts” in income taxes. However, the figures presented in the Budget papers and other figures give the lie to this pseudo-generosity.
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Peake – trunk 60

Jackson — health elements of regional policy 50

Armitage – ACT key elements 35-40

Hull – glance

Page 2: reaction. Largely aap and subs. Spills.

Hull – Leader

Liftout

P25: Lead Macklin Rural roundup. 50 Sharpe.

Burgess: PS overall. 50 CSIRO cuts. 40 AGs cuts. 45 AFP cuts 35

P26: Deforest. Rural pic story. Lead Armitage ACT expanded. 40-50

P27: Lead Lawson Border security immigration. 45 Wright Defence. 35 Foreign Aid (stock pic) 30

P28: Deforest Education pic story. Macdonald Tertiaty ed plus research 60 Secondary ed. 40

P29: Deforest Aged care pic story. Lawson Work program for aged and means test 45. Dixon Means testing. 40 Super. 40

P30: Wright Spectrum and debt 40. Burgess Risks liabs 30. Musa Communications 35. Arts 35. Macklin Sport 25

P31: Families pic story Deforest. Jackson rest of health 50. Lawson Child support 40.

P32: Urban eco cycle + 2 graphs. Peake comment. Big graphs. Coleman 75 fed state. political funding

P33: Costello speech.

JUST what is the rural and regional Australia that we are hearing so much about? Does it approximate the shaded area of the adjacent map? If so, we are looking at just 15 seats. It is a lot of money for 10 per cent of the electorate.

Take out another 15 seats and you have only capital-city seats plus Tasmania and a few near-capital seats.

The way the leaders of the major parties are talking, you would think that rural and regional Australia is half the population. In fact, it is less than 20 per cent, though it does have 90 per cent of the area.

When you look at the seats that all this effort is being put into, it is bizarre. Only three of the first 15 mentioned are even remotely marginal – that is requiring a swing of less than 5 per cent. The other 12 are dead-safe Coalition seats.

Let’s go to the next 15 seats out to see whether this politically generated rural-urban divide is justified. Quite a few of these seats are indeed marginal – at least in Queensland, NSW and Victoria. In Queensland they are marginal seats because there is an Labor urban base pitted against a rural hinterland. The seats of Herbert, Dawson and Hinkler are each centred a moderate sized city – Townsville, Mackay and Gladstone, respectively. The trap here is that the more a political party plays the to the tune of the rural, isolated rusticate, the more it will alienate the city dwellers in that electorate.
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There must be another event on. Perhaps something on the Futsal slab, or at Regatta Point. It was Sunday morning at 11.30. Perhaps something at the Bishop’s house. There were a lot of cars and the number seemed to be swelling.

I had three reasons for being on the northern side of Commonwealth Avenue Bridge. The first was reconciliation. As a white Australia I would like to see the Government that represents me make a statement that it and we are sorry for past injustices to the indigenous people of Australia. Why now, and not earlier in our history? Because of the report by Sir Ronald Wilson into the Stolen Generations. Sure, you can quibble over the some of evidentiary details like former Aboriginal Affairs Minister Peter Howson, but the tale is essentially true: a huge number of Aboriginal children were taken from their parents to be assimilated into white society.

Coming from the southside I turned under the bridge and into the Regatta Point carpark. I was early. Before long the left lane both north and southbound of the bridge were at a standstill. So what else was going on here? It was extraordinarily cold. The lowest May maximum on record. Despite the mythology of negative minimum temperatures advertised to the rest of Australia every winter’s news bulletin, Canberra is not a cold city. It has low wind and high winter daytime temperatures. Who cares if it is minus 3 at 3am? But plus 4 in the middle of the day is bitter. And still the crowd built up.

Continue reading “2000_05_may_reconciliation”

The Liberal minority Government would stand or fall on its Budget, the Chief Minister Kate Carnell told the national Press Club yesterday.

She said it was an all-or-nothing matter and her Government would not allow the Budget to be picked over line by line by the cross-benches.

“”That’s the way we have always played it, and there’s nothing different this year,” she said.

The statement came as three cross-benchers and the Labor Opposition have attacked elements of the Budget and the Labor. Together they would form a majority.

Mrs Carnell said also that the decision by Prime Minister John Howard not to live in Canberra had cost the territory jobs.

“”A lot of things, like meetings, that used to happen in Canberra now go to Sydney,” she said. “”That is bad for the city and it sends a bad message. . . .

“”There is not doubt it has cost money coming into the ACT and money means jobs.”
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Communication Minimiser Richard Alston: We can’t run the company’s business for it. It would be I think the most chilling effect on competition and the operation of the marketplace if you were to go in there and second guess the business and say, you should not buy this; you should not sell that; or you should do something else. I mean that’s just not real life. What we do is we provide subsidies such as the customer service guarantee arrangement, such as the universal service obligation, such as price caps. In a whole range of areas we apply community standards to telephone services. But we don’t try and tell businesses how to run particular parts of the operation.

The above quotation is taken from Senator Alston on the ABC programme AM yesterday morning. It is an explanation of why it is not the Government’s fault that telecommunications company One.Tel appears to have gone belly up. One its own it might be a perfectly reasonable statement of Government policy. In the context of what the Government has been doing in the telecommunications portfolio in the past six years, it is a damning piece of inconsistency. Indeed, it encapsulates all the worst elements of this Government’s communications policy.
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Fraser a Gorton supporter (like costello to Howard) esp over significant policy Cw state rels seabed legislation (made after 69 election without mention during campaign) …. But critic quietly about Gorton brow-beating brash way esp unilateral decision to go ahead without states even though Min for Nat Dev, David faribairn todl states cw wd not move without further consultation. 1970.

Feb 2, 1971, challenge by sen Ian Wood (grassroots queenslander) no seconder. March 10, 1971, he was out.

Harry Turner (noth shore seat)… told party meeting Gorton was secretive and offhand in formulating policies. Instead of white paper public and party comment method.
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