Crispin Hull

The Australian Bureau of Statistics annual trends published last week presents a depressing trend many for middle-aged and elderly Australians. We should take note of the prospects and aim to do something about them.

The fact the population is ageing is well-known. The details that came out of the bureau’s 1999 Australian Social Trends, however, reveal more about the consequences of the ageing population. Thirty-two percent of people over the age of 65 live alone. And those people spent 79 per cent of their time alone. Elderly single women outstripped the number of me by almost two to one.

As the population ages, more people will be leading lonely lives, unless action is taken.
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Last week a full Federal Court dismissed an appeal from a single-judge decision which made inferences of improper conduct of High Court judge Justice Ian Callinan 10 years ago when he was a barrister. In doing so the full court found that the inferences against the judge were irrelevant to the issue at hand, but did not overturn or in any way impugn the original inferences.

The question now remains whether there should be some sort of inquiry about Justice Callinan’s conduct with a view to determining whether he should remain on the bench.

Politics will be the main determinant of those questions, not the merits of the case. The reason is that the appointment of Justice Callinan was enmeshed in political controversy. It came at a time when the High Court was under fire from politicians on the conservative side of politics over its decisions in the two leading native-title cases, the first was the Mabo case which found that native title existed in Australia and the second was the Wik case. Among the attacks was a call by the Deputy Prime Minister, Time Fischer, for the appointment of what he called a capital C conservative to the High Court Bench. Shortly thereafter, the Government appointed Mr Callinan, QC. Mr Callinan was known for being a conservative. He is seen therefore, rightly or wrongly, as a conservative appointment and someone of similar philosophic view as the Coalition Government. The chances, then, of any impartiality in decisions on whether to launch and inquiry or what to do with the results of the inquiry will be reduced. A split along party lines will be almost inevitable.
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Parliamentary secretary Warren Entsch has dug himself into further trouble. He now says that he left his accountant in charge of his companies and therefore did not breach Prime Minister John Howard’s reinterpretation of the ministerial code of conduct. Mr Entsch now argues that as he was not involved in the day to day running of Cape York Concrete Pty Ltd there was no conflict of interest in the company securing a contract with the RAAF. The trouble with that is that the Corporations Law requires directors and company secretaries to behave with diligence which requires an active interest.

Mr Entsch appears like a man scrambling around for defences without thinking them through. Much the same could be said about his leader, John Howard, and the Attorney-General, Daryl Williams.
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Opposition frontbencher Martin Ferguson has called for the Labor Party to return to basics and appeal to its working-class roots. He accused the former Keating government of pandering to special interest groups, saying the ALP had been taken over by a middle-class elite, including many tertiary-educated women, who focused too much on special interest groups.

In the introduction to a new book on the gentrification of the ALP launched last this week – Labor Without Class by Michael Thompson — Mr Ferguson said the ALP forgot key members of its heartland: women who were not in the workforce. Mr Ferguson suggested that Labor’s message in the mid-1990s was hostile to non-working women and this caused a collaspe in the vote.

Mr Ferguson’s comments were rejected by his leader, Kim Beazley, who argued that Labor was beating the Coalition on women’s vote, votes in poorer seats and votes overall.
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Prime Minister John Howard may as well not have a code of ministerial conduct. If he is not prepared to insist on Warren Entsch’s resignation as parliamentary secretary, the code is not worth anything.

First, Mr Entsch was the half-owner of a company that won a $175,000 government contract. The company, Cape York Concrete, won the contract with the RAAF. The code says ministers should avoid “”any appearance of using public office for private purposes”. There is certainly an appearance here. And that appearance is made more obvious by the fact that Cape York Concrete was the only company asked to tender for the job.

It is not as if the Minister had some shares in a huge blue chip company. This is a small company and such a contract as the one it won from the Government would be bound to improve its financial position and the value of Mr Entsch’s shares.
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Areport to the Government on betterment tax recommends that the rate be cut to 50 per cent. At present it is 75 per cent, but under exisiting legislation, it is scheduled to rise to 100 per cent on September 1.

Betterment, or change-of-use tax, is charged when a leaseholder seeks to change clauses in the lease to permit the use of the land for a different purpose, for example, changing residential to office use.

There are sound reasons for charging the fee for a change in use. The ACT has a leasehold system. People have bought leases, initially from the Government and later from each other. The leases prescribe certain uses. People do not buy land as such. Often people or organisations get land for charity or sporting purposes. As the city has developed, some of the original uses became no longer appropriate. Also, city development has resulted in greater demand for different sort of land uses. A lot of that demand can be put down to public effort. It has come in the form of government infrastructure and services both to the land and its people over the years. There has been substantial public investment in Canberra. If someone holding a lease wants to take advantage of that past investment by changing the purpose, they should contribute to the overall public investment.
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The ACT Government plans to overhaul workers’ compensation in the private sector. It says that it will cut costs by between 10 and 17 per cent, which would be passed on in the form of lower premiums to employers.

The Minsiter for Urban Services, Brendan Smyth, has issued a discussion paper on his plans. Some of the proposals have great merit. Others are merely cost-shifting. Others take away existing rights without much justification. Overall, the proposals are driven more by saving costs in the short-term than anything else.

At present, compensation claims against employers take two forms. The first are common-law claims. These require proof of negligence on the part of the employer. Upon that proof, the worker gets full damages for loss earnings, loss of earning capacity, loss of the amenities of life and pain and suffering. Employers are also generally liable for the negligence of other employees.
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Northern Ireland is getting closer to peace. That statement sounds odd in the face of the weekend’s events, with an impasse over the peace process and confrontation between Catholics and Protestants at Dumcree. But in the past five years a European influence in Ireland, both north and south, is having a slow but profound effect. That European influence, through the European Union, has been delivering a message of peaceful co-existence and co-operation between people of different religions and languages. The other message has been to highlight the price of failure to engage in dialogue and co-operation: the Somme, the Holocaust and more recently Kosovo.

The new European message is one of multi-party dialogue and importance of engaging many community leaders, rather than allow events to be shaped by one or two individuals.

In Ireland the days of the dominance of political events by one or two individuals is over. So, too, are the days of bombing and widespread religious intolerance. The main reason for these developments has not been solely due to Anglo-Irish peace programs. Rather the people of Ireland have seen peaceful co-existence of different racial, religious, national, political and linguistic groups in Europe in places where hitherto there has been blood. They have also seen the barriers between Northern Ireland as a part of the United Kingdom and the Republic or Ireland come down as a requirement of their respective membership of the European Union.
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The strife the ACT Government is in over the Bruce Stadium is more political than legal. And the consequences are more likely to be political rather than legal. However, the political and legal issues have become intertwined. Moreover, questions of public perception will be ultimately more important than legal niceties.

The public perception is probably as follows: the Government set out to upgrade Bruce stadium in late 1996 at a cost of $27 million. The Government would put in $12.3 million and the private sector would put in the rest. The public probably presumed that the public and private money would go in concurrently as the stadium was constructed and that after construction the private-sector partners would get reasonable profits.

The stadium would be suitable for Raiders and Brumbies games and Olympic soccer which would be great for the territory.
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