Crispin Hull

The much ado about little in the past week over the GST is just a foretaste.

With Prime Minister John Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello away on holidays, Financial Services Minister Joe Hockey made a complete hash over the rounding-up issue, aided and abetted by Acting Prime Minister John Anderson.

Neither Hockey or Anderson appear to understand their own new tax system. That is perhaps understandable given its complexity — several volumes of taxation Acts. But you would think that the Government would have left someone on deck who did.

This is just the beginning. Several things will conspire to make the introduction of the new tax fairly hellish for Howard. This is a shame because Australia’s tax regime needs reform of this kind.

The rounding-up furore was unnecessary.

Last Friday week, Hockey said prices could be rounded up beyond 10 per cent for the GST but, overall, companies would not be allowed to profit from higher prices.
Continue reading “2000_01_january_gst for forum”

Year after year the same cry goes out. Too many people getting gongs for just doing their job. Too many top gongs going to people in top jobs. Too many ex-politicians. Too many sportspeople. Too many volunteers in the bottom rungs of the gong list. Not enough women, except in the bottom rungs of the gong list among the volunteers.

And it never changes.

Every year, hand-wringing is done calling for changes

The awards go: companion, officer, member, medal. Getting the medal were those working, usually as volunteers, among the down and out – people working for nothing or next to nothing with little help and few resources. The companions and officers went to people paid perfectly good salaries for doing their job – people who were already getting a good share of life’s riches: high pay, interesting work, plenty of subordinates to do the menial tasks, power, air-conditioned offices invitations to glittering functions, and even gold medals in their field.

Paul Keating had the right attitude. He refused an award under the Order of Australia, saying being Prime Minister was honour enough and that he had been amply rewarded.
Continue reading “2000_01_january_gongs forum”

John Howard may well describe the Liberal Party as a broad church, but God help you if you are on the wrong side of the nave. Or should that be knave?

The past week has seen a further break-out of ideological warfare (or at least skirmishing) in the Liberal Party. There were two sources of the skirmishes. One was a statement by retiring MP Michael Ronaldson that Peter Costello was the natural successor to John Howard. The other was the Young Liberals’ conference in Canberra condemning former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and an equivocal speech by newly appointed Cabinet Minister Tony Abbott defending Fraser, much as Mark Antony defended Brutus. In doing so, Abbott referred to the broad church, while smugly sitting on the right side of the nave.

Ronaldson’s remark on its face was remarkably unremarkable. Ever since the Telecard affair damned Peter Reith’s chance at the leadership – if there ever was one – it was obvious that Peter Costello was in the box seat. So why would any on-record formal statement by a retiring back-bencher to that effect be of any moment? Well, because every leader prefers two or more leadership aspirants, rather than one. Two or more cancel each other out. Reith and Costello cancelled each other out. When both were in the game, it was seen that they would only fight it out after Howard voluntarily decided to quit. If only one were in the game, Howard might not have the luxury to deciding when to quit. There would be a challenge.
Continue reading “2000_01_january_forum libs”

Proposals to change the electoral boundaries in the ACT, like those put yesterday, will have a profound effect on who is elected and ultimately how we are governed.

At present we have three electorates. Molonglo in the centre is a seven-seat electorate. Brindabella based on Tuggeranong is a five-seat electorate. Ginninderra based on Belconnen is also a five-seat electorate. That makes 17 seats.

Under the Hare-Clark system we have multi-member electorates. This was approved twice in a referendum. The system is more complex than the system of the federal House of Representatives, but it is better suited to small places like the ACT and Tasmania.

The reason is that the ACT is a fairly uniform place. If the political mood swings it swings evenly. There are no pockets of die-hard Labor or die-hard Liberal voting like there are in the Australia-wide profile. In any national election Melbourne Ports, Newcastle and Fremantle will always vote Labor. Toorak and the North Shore will always vote Liberal. It means that nationally we will always get an Opposition.

In the ACT, however, if you extrapolate electoral figures from previous elections into single member seats you would get results like 16 Labor, 1 Independent or 15 Liberal, 2 Labor. The results would be so skewed even from fairly even two-party preferred votes that there would be no effective Opposition. A 53-47 two-party preferred vote in the ACT could lead to the Government having 16 seats and the Opposition just 1.
Continue reading “2000_01_january_forum act seats”

This is ominous. The file on cycling (in our new-age paper-clipping library) can be found on the compactus arm with the heading “”A.C.T. ADMINISTRATION to CREMATORIUM”.

This week the Minister for Urban Services announced that $520,000 would be spent on cyclepaths. Fine. But let’s not repeat past mistakes.

I suspect that the people in charge of cyclepaths do not actually cycle. They couldn’t. Cyclepaths in Canberra must be designed by motorists, for the motorists.

No sane traffic engineer could possibly have got on to a bicycle and negotiated, for example, the concrete chicane in the median strip on the loop road that leads from Wentworth Avenue to King Avenue Bridge. Traffic zooms in both directions around the spaghetti loop to and from the bridge. The main around-the-lake bicycle path crosses this loop with the dreaded chicane in the median strip.

Ah, ah, says the engineer, who has never ridden a bicycle since he was eight, I’ll make it safe. I will build a great big concrete chicane in the median strip so that cyclists will have to weave left and then right so they will have to see if there are any cars coming in either direction.
Continue reading “2000_01_january_cycle”

The race to fill former Chief Minister Kate Carnell’s Legislative Assembly seat was throw wide open yesterday.

Until now the presumption was that Liberal Jacqui Burke would win the seat. But after close of counting yesterday, Liberal John Louttit is well ahead.

ACT Electoral Commissioner Phil Green issued figures at the close of the count yesterday with Mr Louttit on 6487 votes ahead of Mrs Burke on 3736 with Labor’s Marion Reilly next on 240 and the other seven candidates each this less than that.

Mr Green warned that these votes “”are not necessarily representative of the votes still to be counted and the relative order of the various candidates may change after further counting”.

Mr Louttit said yesterday, “”I didn’t go into this just for the fun of having my name in there.”

The seat is determined on a countback of the 25,379 ballot papers that marked Mrs Carnell as first preference. No other ballots are looked at. Under the ACT’s Hare-Clark system the aim is to find the candidate next most preferred by the people who voted for the retiring member. There are no by-elections for the ACT Legislative Assembly.
Continue reading “2000_01_january_count back news”

Imagine coming across in the wild a very large number of animals – together they might cover an area as big as an office carpark. In those circumstances, you would either flee in fear of the animals, or the animals would flee in fear of you.

That is, unless you are underwater and the animals are corals.

Most corals are like a like triffids in reverse. Instead of walking plants, they are stationary animals, at least most of the time.

They are exceptionally varied, diverse and beautiful. They are also threatened.

Only with the advancement of scuba diving in the past 30 years has the study of corals been possible in any great detail, though naming of species has been going on for at least two centuries. But barely have we had time to study, classify and understand corals in any detail and we are destroying them at an alarming rate. It has happened in our lifetime.

A new publication, for the first time, describes the corals of the world. It is an extraordinary work, in three volumes over 1382 pages with more than 4000 colour photographs. Corals of the World is by J. E. N. Veron and published by Australian Institute of Marine Science and CRR Qld Ltd. Mary Stafford-Smith is the Scientific Editor and Producer.
Continue reading “2000_01_january_coral reefs”

Australia’s capital was conceived in acrimonious jealous, born in secrecy and was under-nourished for the first half-century of its life. Now it is one of the great creations of human endeavour.

In the 1890s the vision of federation spread across the continent. At that time, the question of a capital for the future federated colonies was hardly on the agenda. By the end of the decade it threatened to wreck the whole project.

At the constitutional conventions in 1890 in Melbourne and 1891 in Sydney the big questions were financial. NSW, the mother colony, was worried about having to pay the way of less prosperous colonies. Federation was much more popular in Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia than NSW. NSW wanted free trade and did not want too much regulation of the labour force. Victoria wanted protection for its manufacturing and strong federal powers over arbitration of working conditions.

The early drafts of the Constitution which arose from the unelected 1890 and 1891 conventions merely said that it would be a matter for the new Federal Parliament to determine where the federal capital should be, though the then anti-federalist William Lyne attempted to sow discord by suggesting that the Constitution should fix the place of the capital.
Continue reading “2000_01_january_canberra create”

The replacement for retiring Member of the Legislative Assembly Kate Carnell has been chosen – the Liberal party’s Jacqui Burke.

Was the method by which she was chosen the best and fairest?

There are three methods of replacing retiring members of Parliament in Australia: the by-election (for the Lower Houses of the Commonwealth and all states and territories bar the ACT and Tasmania); party selection (for the Senate and some state Upper Houses) and the Hare-Clark count-back (for Tasmania and the ACT).

Jacqui Burke was chosen by the Hare-Clark count-back. Briefly, all the ballot papers which went to elect the retiring member are selected out and recounted to seek out who was next the preferred available candidate of those voters. It is the next “”available” candidate because the preference might first have gone to an existing sitting member or it might have gone to a candidate who no longer wants to take a seat in the Assembly – having lost at the general election a candidate might have found a new fulfilling life.

But why not have a by-election? Surely, a lot of people who voted for Kate Carnell in 1998 might well have changed their mind by January 2000?
Continue reading “2000_01_january_by-election not on”

The merits of having a new capital hewn out of the unpopulated wilderness as against having the capital in an existing city were tossed about by delegates in the Adelaide and Melbourne constitutional conventions of 1897 and 1898 with wonderful Victorian language:

Joseph Abbott (NSW): I think that the position of New South Wales is exactly the same as the position of the state of New York, the capital of which is Albany. The capital of the state of New York contains 91,000 inhabitants-that is, the legal capital of the state of New York-but the city of New York, with Brooklyn, which forms part of the same city, contains 2,500,000 inhabitants. Wherever you fix the capital of Federated Australia, I feel sure that the facilities of trade will fix the capital where those facilities are the greatest, and I am not at all concerned as to where the capital will be fixed as a matter of law, because I know where it will be as a matter of fact. As there is no other city with the facilities of Sydney, the capital will, de facto, be Sydney, although it may, de jure, be in Western Australia. I think it is a small thing to quarrel about, or devote our attention to at present. Representing New South Wales, I am perfectly prepared to leave it to the Federal Parliament to determine where the capital of the Commonwealth shall be.

Then there was this exchange:

Joseph Carruthers (NSW): We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that very good argument may be used against having the federal capital dissociated from those centres of trade and commerce and culture which exist in Australia. I, for one, look at the example which the United States has afforded us as one not worthy of being copied – to establish the capital almost in the wilderness, away from where commercial men, professional men, men of education, are wont to congregate, away from where their business keeps them together, and to set the affairs of the State, forsooth, to be conducted in some far distant place, where there are not those surroundings of civilization which tend to make life pleasant or to make society happy. I think that one of the results of establishing the capital of the United States at Washington, has been largely to divorce from political life some of the best elements of the community. We do not want to copy a mistake of that character. Let us contemplate for one moment the establishment of a federal capital, as has been proposed in some places, in the interior of Australia. There are many who advocate its establishment there on the ground that it will be easily defended.
Continue reading “2000_01_january_break-out debate”