Crispin Hull

The new President of Chile, Ricardo Lagos, has taken a commendable stand on former dictator Augusto Pinochet. Mr Lagos, who was forced into exile during Pinochet’s rule, says it is up to the courts to decide what is to be done.

Pinochet led a military coup against the elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973. In his 17-year rule his regime was responsible for the kidnap, torture and murder of at least 3000 Chileans. Pinochet has stated that he is not guilty even if those under him committed crimes. He was made a senator for life which granted him immunity from prosecution when Chile moved to democratic rule.

The questions now are whether a Chilean court can remove that immunity and if it can whether Pinochet is medically fit to be tried and if he can be linked to kidnap, death and torture that was committed by people in authority under his regime.

The extent of the human suffering inflicted by the Pinochet regime would make it understandable if the new Lagos Government acted with vengeance. But it would not be excusable. Mr Lagos’s position that it is a matter for the courts without any interference from the Government. He is determined to show that the rule of law must triumph over the arbitrary exercise of power.
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The decolonisation period in the Indonesian archipelago is not over with the independence of the former Portuguese enclave of East Timor.

True that enclave had an existence as a Portuguese territory for 30 years after Indonesia became an independent nation after centuries of Dutch rule, so it was ripe for a separate existence because it had developed its own culture after 400 years of Portuguese rule. However, the people of the rest of the Indonesian archipelago did not necessarily get cohesion and unity merely by having the common background of being under Dutch colonial rule for a long time. The archipelago contains hundreds of different ethnic, religious and linguistic throughout its thousands of islands. Until President Suharto resigned two years ago, the archipelago was held together under the Indonesian Republic by a combination of the threat of force and gradual economic improvement. As the economy faltered people began to question corruption and the lack of democracy. Suharto’s days were numbered. The election 1ate last year gave the new President Addurrahman Wahid democratic legitimacy, even if the electoral process was somewhat flawed. However, his government did not inherit a legacy of the rule of law and smooth running institutions. More significantly it did not inherit a military that was used to following orders from a democratically elected government. To the contrary, the military had a long history of taking a central role in politics and government.

This has made Wahid’s task immensely difficult. As a democrat his mere presence in the presidency has been a catalyst to local movements for democracy in Indonesia’s regions. Fuelled by the independence vote in East Timor, separatist movements have flourished. Most of them have had a religious elements. Most have involved acts of sustained violence.
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The draft ACT Budget brought down this week marks a significant achievement by the ACT Government over the past five years. The surplus Budget (in fact the surplus is so small we should talk of a balanced Budget) indicates that the ACT is paying its way for the first time since self-government. And the projected surpluses over the following three years indicate that the ACT can start reducing debt incurred in previous years.

The fiscal frugality has come at some cost. Canberrans have noticed a falling in standards of maintenance of streets, parks and waterways in the past five years and some cuts in health and education service delivery. The essential difficulty was that the ACT got self-government right at the time the Federal Government was tightening spending on the ACT anyway.

The Carnell Government can be questioned over some spending priorities, but it has done well on fiscal fundamentals. It means the community will be better off in the long run because it will not be paying taxes to fund debt, rather the taxes will go to fund things that government should fund: education, health and transport.
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One might well wonder who was left holding the baby over the past week. Was it Sports and Tourism Minister Jackie Kelly who became the first Federal Minister to have a baby while in office? Or was Joe Hockey, it the Minister acting in her portfolio and a couple of other portfolios at the same time while various Ministers took leave during the “”quiet” summer period. Mr Hockey is Minister for Financial Services.

On Friday last week he said that business could round up GST charges to the nearest dollar as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission had declared rounding off legal. But when Qantas rounded up the $1.50 GST levy on frequent-flyer memberships to $2, there was an outcry. The next day Mr Hockey reversed his decision, saying that the Government would not tolerate any price rises about 10 per cent.

It looked like the Government did not know what is was doing. And in some respects it didn’t. Mr Hockey’s initial stand gave a poor impression to consumers. This was because it arose from looing at things from a business perspective, not a consumer perspective. Business wants rounding because they say it makes for easier accounting. Business says that overall, rounding would not make any difference because each business GST on total takings at exactly 10 per cent. Some prices might go up by more than 10 per cent but other prices would come down an equivalent amount.
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As the ACT Legislative Assembly enters an election year, the Liberal Party will miss the dynamism of Kate Carnell. Even if some of her electoral appeal has worn off. Mrs Carnell’s replacement in the Assembly was decided this week on a count-back of Mrs Carnell’s 1998 vote. The winner was Liberal Jacqui Burke. The lack of depth in the Liberal line-up was made clear when Chief Minister Gary Humphries preferred to have a four-member ministry rather than risk giving back-bencher Harold Hird or the newcomer Mrs Burke a ministry, however junior, and increasing it to five, as it was when Mrs Carnell was in the Assembly.

Mr Hird at least will get some relief from his load of committee work. The Assembly has prohibited ministers from serving on committees. Hitherto if the Liberals wanted representation on a committee only Mr Hird or Speaker Greg Cornwell were available.

Now Mrs Burke will be able to sit on committees.

Committee work is the unsung success of the Legislative Assembly, and indeed of self-government generally. Committee enable members of the community a great say in the government of the territory. They expose MLAs to a range of views and help MLAs understand issues. It is unfortunate that whichever party is in government will find it difficult to furnish both a ministry and committee representation. It is no solution to suggest that Ministers could also serve on committees. In a small jurisdiction like the ACT, they have their work cut out as it is, frequently having to deal with several portfolio areas. Moreover, it is not good practice to blur the lines between the Executive and the Legislature. Committee work is inherently a legislative function and forms a critical part of the questioning of the Executive, particularly the Estimates and Public Accounts Committees.
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As economic conditions improve with the longest continuous period of economic growth in Australia since the 1950s, several disquieting factors emerge to upset the trend.

First, we suck imports which puts pressure on the currency and overheats the economy. The corrective action is the raise interest rates which slow things down, but carries the danger of causing the economy and employment to contract. Australia’s balance of trade during this boom remains is worrying, but judicious use of interest rate rises and care to ensure foreign capital continues to flow in can control things.

Secondly, we get a shortage of skilled labour and demands for higher wages. Coupled with this is unions flexing muscle because the boom makes them feel the spectre of unemployment is gone.

This is a more worrying trend. Higher wages, if paid by enterprises that can afford it because they are doing well in the boom, are to be welcomed. Higher standards of living is what economic policy should be about. The trouble arises, however, when wage claims are made across the board or when union muscle is flexed in boom times more in order to keep power than to increase pay.
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The ACT Government will publish its draft Budget tomorrow. The draft will go before committees of the Assembly which contain MLAs from the Opposition and cross benches as well as government members. The committees will be able to make recommendations for changes before the Budget is voted on by the whole House. It is an experiment in governance not undertaken anywhere else. The fact no other jurisdiction has approached budgets this way does not matter. There is nothing wrong with trying new things. However, this experiment so fundamentally alters the checks and balances of the Westminster system that its wisdom must be questioned. So, too, must the motive for it.

The normal Westminster model has the Executive or Government determined by a majority on the floor of the lower house of parliament, or in the case of the ACT, the only house of Parliament. Sometimes that can be a permanent majority locked in by party discipline. More commonly these days, the majority is not permanent or guaranteed. It is made up of a major party plus independents or members of minor parties. Or sometimes the majority is solid in the lower house but there is no majority in the upper house. In any event, a majority of the members of the legislature hand executive authority to a prime or chief minister. Executive authority is power to apply the laws of the legislature and to spend money in accordance with those laws.

Critical elements of executive authority are the power to make regulations under legislation so the legislation works in detail, the power to make appointments and the power to spend money to give effect to legislation. The executive must always abide by legislation. It must always abide by the law.
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Canberra might have lost CHOGM earlier this month, but this week it followed a commendable pattern of behaviour. Get kicked in the guts by the Federal Government, use your brains to do something about it, bounce back. The rest of Australia is mostly unaware of this attribute of Canberra. That is probably because Canberra is used too frequently as a synonym for the Federal Government. It is called metonymy

“”Canberra’s GST horror,” the headline runs. But we would not see headlines like “”Canberra takes CHOGM from Canberra” or “”Canberra hits back after Canberra takes GHOGM from Canberra”.

We have this blurred identity crisis which probably distracts the attention of some businesses outside Australia who see Canberra only as home of the Federal Government with business opportunities limited to supplying the Federal Government. Though this is slowly changing.

The loss of CHOGM (if indeed it was ever seriously contemplated that it would come here in the first place) is unfortunate as an immediate loss to our hospitality industry, but it is perhaps more unfortunate as a loss of opportunity to showcase Canberra to an international audience.
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The British Government has proffered to former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet something he and his regime did not proffer their victims in the 1970s and 1980s — the fair application of the rule of law.

Home Secretary Jack Straw appears to have acted fairly every step of the way. True, Britain would have preferred that Pinochet had never set foot in the country in the first place and this his presence was an embarrassment that could cause a rift in Chilean-British relations. However, it appears that politics did not enter into the decision to determine that Pinochet should not be extradited to Spain to face charges of torture and murder of Spanish citizens who were victims of the Pinochet regime. Pinochet has escaped charges in his native Chile as successive Governments, even democratic ones, have allowed him a form of immunity by granting him a life senatorship and allowing him to continue holding it.

In Chile some regard Pinochet as the saviour of the nation by overthrowing the socialist Allende Government. Others regard him as a murderer and torturer, or at least as a man who encouraged murder and torture.
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The merger between internet service provider America Online and media and entertainment giant Time Warner and the takeover proposal by Telstra’s Bigpond of Ozemail are dramatic illustrations of converging technologies in the communications industry. Convergences of this kind will ultimately make government regulation of broadcasting toothless. They will make the Australian Government’s rules on cross-media ownership, foreign content and ownership and internet content irrelevant anachronisms.

Before widespread internet usage, governments had a significant say in what the public could see and who could publish it to them. That say was centred around the technology of broadcasting. Broadcasting has two elements that make regulation fairly easy. First, the same sound, vision and print being seen by masses of people at the same time (or in the case of print on the same day). Secondly, the sound and vision require access to wireless spectrum of which there is a limited amount.

It means that monitoring authorities can pick up and monitor whatever is broadcast. The public, too, can monitor it note the time it is broadcast and complain about it to authorities. It means also that the limited wireless spectrum can get allocated by government to parties who agree to abide by regulation.
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