Crispin Hull

The call by Greens MLA Kerrie Tucker for an increase in the size of the ACT Legislative Assembly has merit and should be viewed on the merits. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be happening. The snag is the attitude of Labor leader John Stanhope who says he does not want to do anything “”that would reverse the painfully slow acceptance of the Assembly in the minds and hearts of the people”.

Mr Stanhope’s approach reveals a Catch-22. If the Assembly retains its present 17 Members, it is likely that the quality of representation will suffer and that the talent pool for Government Ministers and the Opposition members who shadow them will be shallower. If that happens, the people will take even longer to accept the Assembly.

In any event, the doubts over the acceptance of the Assembly arise as much out of its history as out of the performance of current members. A core of doubt arises from the fact there was a referendum in 1977 that voted against self-government and that the Federal Government enacted self-government without a further vote and hammered the place financially. That in turn resulted in a fractured first Assembly when people foolishly voted for people who stood under the anti-self-government banner but with other agendas. Mr Stanhope is right to be concerned about the doubts, however. They must be dealt with by pointing out that the 1977 referendum is not longer a valid gauge of ACT opinion. The people who voted then would make a small proportion of today’s population. Further, the halcyon days of direct rule with lots of spare money for Canberra were going to end self-government or not, so self-government should not be seen as the cause of later ACT Governments having to tighten the belt. Indeed a directly ruling federal government would have tightened the belt more.
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True to his word, Prime Minister John Howard has started to talk about social issues and less on economic matters, as he promised in his new year’s message. Last week he gave a broad-ranging Federation address. Like his pre-election headland addresses, the Federation address was long on generalities and short on specifics, with one notable exception. The exception was Mr Howard’s call for a change in school hours to mirror work hours more closely. He suggested that schools be open from 9am to 5pm.

Changes to school hours should not be dismissed out of hand. Knee-jerk reactions that Mr Howard is attempting to convert schools to glorified child-minding centres are unfair may have been made more out of self-interest by teachers than out of concern for parents and children.

Mr Howard has flagged the question of school hours before, in 1994. He suggested, then, that schools should more closely reflect work hours. But maybe Mr Howard is looking at the problem from the wrong end. He acknowledges that his idea of the extended school day stems from the fact that many women are working. He may have an idealised world where women are there to look after the children. The essential difficulty, though, is that both men and women have to work too long to keep families at a reasonable standard of living so there is less time for families, for being with children. That is unlikely to happen.
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When Dr Paul Hogan got a court award a couple of weeks ago of $2.9 million for being belted over the hand with a strap, the cry went up that Australia was going the way of the US.

Well, I was in the US at the time, otherwise I would have hopped on my hobby horse (the madness of juries) last week.

In some ways we are going the way the of the US. Meanwhile, some legislatures in the US have had enough of overblown awards to plaintiffs and are gong the other way.

Since the strapping case, the letters and talk back have been filled with ex-students talking about how beatings made men of them or how corporal punishment leaves psychological scars forever. Of equal import, however, is the question of whether juries should be allowed near the courts of justice.

Te jury had obviously seen too many episodes of LA Law and the The Practise (yes Americans spell it like that). In these programs, over-acting lawyers play it up to juries to give humungous awards to plaintiffs to “”send messages” and to respond to “”emotional” needs and so on, irrespective of the justice of the case or the fall-out for the public who have to pay, usually in the form of higher insurance policies or higher prices.

Juries are supposed to bring commonsense and a community view to legal outcomes. Yet here is a case where everyone you talk so says was over the top and at odds with everyone – no commonsense and no community view. The jury awarded Dr Hogan $1.5 million in future economic loss, among other damages, despite the fact that since his strapping he managed to get through a PhD which would have increased his future earning capacity. The jury – as is so often the case – was out of its depth.
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Beaver Run in Breckenridge Beaver Run Resort, Breckenridge Ph: 970 453 6000

Tuesday Wednesday Feb. 13-14

East/West Resorts in Beaver Creek. Check-in at Highlands Lodge. : 970 949 5071

Thursday, Feb. 15

Vail

Friday, Saturday, Feb. 16, 17

Denver Westin Tabor Center.

Continue reading “2000_02_february_itin. kill later”

THE tussle of wills this week between Prime Minister John Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello was eerily similar to that between Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Treasurer Paul Keating.

Costello, like Keating, has (to use Keating’s phrase) his head down and bum in the air working on tax detail. Meanwhile, (again to use Keating’s phrase) Howard is out there tripping on television cables at shopping centres.

Costello seems to be suffering the same frustration as Keating. His leader is ready to undo his work at the slightest, transitory, popular backlash.

On the Business Activity statement this week, Costello defied Howard, at least initially.

Costello wants an efficient tax system and efficient small businesses. It means upsetting a lot of small businesses who have run their accounts out of a shoebox and slopped cash about without paying proper tax.

They need upsetting. Some of these cash businesses will have to start paying proper levels of tax for change. Perhaps that is why they are squealing.
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The Federal Government’s health rebate scheme was bound to be an expensive exercise in futility. The initial estimate of the cost of the scheme was $1.3 billion a year. This financial year it has cost $1.6 billion and next financial year it will cost $2.2 billion — $740 million more than in the forward estimates of 1998-99 when the scheme was first proposed.

The scheme was aimed at attracting people to private health insurance by giving them a tax rebate on their premiums if they earned under a certain amount of income. The scheme has failed dismally. The number of people in private insurance has hardly moved since the scheme was introduced, though it went up slightly with the introduction of two other schemes – heavy penalties (of one per cent of income) for high-income earners and the new age-rating scheme. These two scheme had a slight effect in increasing the number of people with private insurance.

But the rebate scheme has just thrown good money after bad. All the evidence suggests that nearly all the money has gone to people who already have private insurance and who had no intention of stopping it. The scheme was conceived in a cloud of ideology with stupidity as a midwife.
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In the long history of our democracy (and it is very long on world standards) there has been an ebb and flow of power.

In colonial times power resided mainly in the colonial (state) capitals. London was too far away. Then in 1901 there was a shift of power to the central government (then in Melbourne). Then in 1925 the High Court stopped than trend and power moved back to the states. In 1942 under threat of Japanese invasion power moved back to the centre, where it has stayed by and large until now. In 1942, the states were forced to give up income tax, which the Commonwealth has kept ever since. I suspect things are about to change and some power is about to move back to the states.

This is due to the way the GST has been framed.

In an article on Wednesday I crunched a lot of figures which should not be repeated here. There is some argument of the detail but the central thesis remains. Prime Minister John Howard, in his eagerness to get the GST up gave away too much. He gave away all the GST revenue to the states.
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The ACT has long urged for the widest among of DNA sampling at meetings of federal and state ministers. There is some merit in this but there are legitimate concerns.

In Britain the DNA database contains the DNA records of more than 400,000 people. It has helped solve a lot of crime and helped exonerate a lot of victims. In the US, DNA testing is being used decades later to bring people to justice and to exonerated convicted people. In one case of poetic justice, a man has been charged with the murder of a DNA researcher Helena Greenwood. Ms Greenwood scratched at her attacker and pieces of skin under her fingernails were kept after her death and later DNA tested. Police allege a match with a prime suspect, 24 years later.

The criminal justice concerns do not centre around the testing itself. Everyone agrees on the science. If you have two samples of bodily matter – one taken from the accused and one from the crime scene — scientists can DNA test each one to obtain an identifying bar code. If the bar codes match there is no rational doubt that the bodily samples come from the same person (unless they are identical twins).

But getting an exact match, does not of itself prove the person did the crime.

Other questions must be satisfied.

Did Sample B come from the crime scene? It could have been planted.
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Labor’s move this week to amend digital television and datacasting laws is worse than closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Because Labor provided the bullet to shoot the horse.

The horse is the fantastic opportunities that should have been available to Australians with the digital tweaking of the available spectrum. It could have, and should have, provided for five networks (the ABC, SBS and the three commercials) to have up to four programming signals each of standard digital definition, and perhaps half a dozen datacasters to provide (over the airwaves) super Internet services which would have included video quality services.

But no, the Government bowed to commcerial television interests. It canned the idea of any of the present networks offering four standard definition programs and instead ordered that all five netowrks must burn up all their spectrum in offering one high-definition signal (with a few add-ons so you can see the same sport from several angles and some extra text searching). This is good for the commercials because all their audience is concentrated, as now, into one programming and one advertising stream which is much cheaper and easier to deliver than four program streams of standard definition.
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It was sad to see a whole nation prostrate itself in adulation of a man who could hit a round piece of leather with a piece of wood.

Sure, he hit it very well. Better than anyone else, no doubt. But really, is this good cause for using phrases like “”the greatest Australian”, for stopping the national Parliament, for devoting more than half the night’s television news bulletins, for wrapping every newspaper in the country with pages and pages of tributes and so on?

And in all these hectares of words, there were precious few from the man himself. He did not contribute much to the great debates, at least publicly.

The adulation is puzzling. It is more than 50 years since he played a test match. That was pre-television, so there is not much vision of his performance. Sure, Bradman lifted the spirits of a few people during the Depression with his sporting prowess. Circuses and dance halls did the same thing.

Did he significantly improve the standard of living or quality of life of Australians through scientific discovery like: Florey, Braggs, Macfarlane Burnet, Eccles, Comforth or Doherty. Did he create and inspire like Lawson, Paterson, Gibbs, Carey, White, Roberts, Heysen or Whiteley. Did he chronicle like Bean? What of our film-makers? Did he explore like Sturt, Forrest, Stuart, Hume and Hovell?
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