Crispin Hull

Sometimes a mundane event in a journalist’s life puts a small light on matters of public moment.

A while ago I sold my house in North Canberra after it had been tenanted for a couple of years. The real-estate agent had no sooner hammered in the second post of the “”For Sale” sign than a buyer approached and a price was settled verbally. Sure, there was no binding contract, but clearly the buyer knew what he was after. He lived in the area. He knew the house quite well.

But what do we find. Meddling legislatures demanding that we get an energy efficiency rating before the house can be formally sold. The agent told me it would be about $200 and there was no escape.

I told him I wanted the cheapest possible EER he could possibly arrange and I didn’t care if it was rated minus 20 because the buyer wanted to buy and I wanted to sell and I didn’t see what business it was of government (or more correctly the legislature) to impose that extra cost, which one way or the other would fall on both of us. The buyer could be a landlord who one way or the other would try to pass the cost on to a stuggling tenant or a struggling first-home buyer.
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The United States has forfeited the right to call itself a free-trade nation. Its decision to hit lamb imports with both a quota and a tariff was done for one reason only – protection of its home industry. The only good thing that can be said about the US decision was that it was up front. There was no pretence from the US to limit lamb from Australia and New Zealand on spurious health or quarantine grounds.

The US hit imported lamb with a quota set at 1998 levels of 32 million tonnes. The tariff below the quota will be 9 per cent for the first year, 6 per cent in the second and 3 per cent in the third and final year. The tariff is about 1 per cent now. The quota level will rise a trivial 857 tonnes in the second and third years. Imports above the quota will face a 40 per cent tariff the first year, a 32 per cent tariff the second year and a 24 per cent tariff in the third year.

The 40 per cent rate is almost prohibitive. The short lead time, less than two weeks, indicates the US Administration was acting to appease a noisy group of US producers with political clout.
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The Mayor of Queanbeyan, Frank Pangallo has argued that it will cost his city up to $40 million if the Poplars housing development does not go ahead. The proposed estate is directly under the future flight path of Canberra International Airport. Mr Pangallo says Poplars represents about a fifth of readily developable land for the city.

Mr Pangallo has a point, but the Poplars should still not go ahead. Relocation of Canberra Airport is out of the question. Traffic will inevitably increase to make life at the Poplars a noisy hell.

Mr Pangallo’s suggestion of giving future residents a warning on their zoning certificates is no solution. In 20 years’ time the warning will count for nothing. Real estate agents will downplay the future problem. Building the Poplars will result in a huge future conflict like those near Sydney Airport and at Badgery’s Creek. We must learn from those lessons.
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Israel’s new Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, will easily be able to revive the Middle East peace process after several years of inconclusive brinkmanship by his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu. The world and the stakeholders in the Middle East will look to him with hope. The real question, however, is will Mr Barak be able to make the necessary break in Israeli thinking to achieve a lasting peace.

The central difficulty has been that just as Israel gained territory and military security since 1948 by a series of bilateral conflicts, too many Israeli leaders in the past two decades have assumed that peace can be made the same way. Israel has always hoped that peace could be attained by a series of bilateral arrangements. First with Jordan to expel Palestinians, then with Egypt over return of territory occupied in the 1967 war, then hoping to pick off Syria be with a deal over the occupied Golan Heights, and all the while using military force to quell any threat from Lebanon. More significantly, the question of the Palestinians has also been seen as one of a bilateral arrangement involving borders. If the Palestinians could only be held within defined borders all would be well.
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Prime Minister John Howard and his Government face a difficult task with the reform of business taxes. The Government has achieved a reform of personal and wholesale taxes, but at some cost. It has had to water down some of its original proposals. Moreover, it probably started with a package less than its ideal in the hope of attracting wider support. In particular its GST-income tax package did nothing to reduce Australia’s high top marginal rate of income tax. At 48.5 per cent, it acts as a disincentive to individuals in Australia, a disincentive for foreign investors to set up quarters here and an incentive to engage in tax avoidance.

But the Government is on the right track. It must broaden the base and lower the incidence of taxation. This will maximise the revenue base to do those things which only governments can do and will minimise any distorting effect taxation has. People tend to prefer low-tax activity to high-tax activity.

With business tax, the Government faces several very tricky influences.
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One of the saddest features of attempts at constitutional reform in Australia is not so much that they always come with scare campaigns, but that the scare campaigns often work.

Coupled with a history of politicians putting unacceptable power-grabbing proposals to the people, the prospect of attaining any sensible reform is fairly bleak. One hundred years after federation, it is but a small and obvious step to have an Australian head of state. The Queen of the United Kingdom, who at present is also our Queen, would remain at the head of the Commonwealth and Australia a member of it. Instead of the Prime Minister having the power to appoint the Governor-General by putting a name to the Queen and the power to remove the Governor-General by asking the Queen, a two-thirds majority of parliament would ratify the nomination of the President who would have exactly the same role as the present Governor-General. And the Queen would not longer be head of state.

But no, the scare campaigns come out. Australia will have a dictator, they argue. The power elites in Canberra will take over because we cannot directly elect the president.
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The Australian Government has reason to be angry at Papua New Guinea for establishing full diplomatic relations with Taiwan. It was done for the basest of reasons: money. It would be almost excusable if it were done just to show that PNG is really and truly independent from Australia. But no, it is about money. Taiwan is willing to buy itself diplomatic recognition with $4 billion of soft loans to help PNG get out of a financial mess of its own making. It will not be to PNG’s good in the long-term.

PNG is richly endowed with natural resources, but like other developing countries so endowed – Nigeria and Angola, for example, — it has made a complete hash of managing them. The richness of the resources makes prospect of getting a slice of the action too attractive.
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Chief Minister Kate Carnell is not showing enough contrition. She has been censured by the Assembly, but she is not giving much indication that she proposes to change the way she conducts the processes of government. No-one expects her to change her personal style; that is part of her voter appeal. She is active, vivacious, participatory and proud of Canberra and Canberrans.

But the Bruce Stadium redevelopment is an example of her Government’s relentless pursuit of outcomes irrespective of process. The stadium, the hospital implosion, Section 41 Manuka and Kinlyside are the four prime examples.

On ABC Radio 2CN yesterday she said she felt neither reprimanded or victorious, but concentrated on “”getting on with the job” – “”health, education, the issues that make a difference to people’s lives”. That is all very well, but what about the changing the way government is done.
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Many Australians would question why young people go in search of adventure of a seemingly dangerous kind. Last week’s incident in the Swiss Alps in which 13 Australians and five others were killed gives cause to reflect on what drove the young travellers to go canyoning in the first place.

George Mallory, the man who came closest to reaching the summit of Mount Everest before Edmund Hillary, was asked why he was attempting to climb the mountain. He answer was, “”Because it is there.” That answer probably holds good for exploration and discovery. It holds good for the mission to the Moon. It is in human nature to explore and discover. If it were not, we would still be living like apes in a life that was nasty, brutish and short.

Doing an adventure run, even if done virtually daily by others, is of a similar kind. There could be many reasons for doing it. It is a cheap (or not so cheap) thrill. There is the element of dare. There is also an element of camaraderie among a group. Most of these kinds of adventure also involve an interaction with the forces of nature: gravity, water, air, rock and so on.
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John Laws has done us all a big favour.

The exposure of his arrangement with the Australian Bankers Association (which represents the major banks) to be paid $1 million to do some advertorial segments and to make some positive statements about the banks could have many benefits.

First it exposes talk-back on commercial radio for what it is: entertainment and commerce. It is not there to inform, but make money. It has ever been thus. Commercial radio talk-back hosts sell their voices in advertisements and get benefits for being positive about certain products.

John Laws now says he is an entertainer and entrepreneur, not a journalist. Fine. But if you are in commerce you should play by the rules of commerce, not by the rules of journalism.
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