Crispin Hull

Jack Waterford is away. I thought he might be silly enough to file from his hospital bed, given he has not missed a column since it began in (DATE), filing from Britain, Indonesia, various Australian capitals and his beloved plains of western NSW.

It appears Jack will be away for some weeks but we expect a full recovery. Perhaps it was nature or god’s warning to slow down on the job and a warning for some of us around him to share the load. Or perhaps a warning to Jack on lifestyle: less nicotine, caffeine and big lunches. More exercise. He is cheerful and doing well.

The pressures of being editor are immense. And it is a question of being editor rather than doing the job of editor. On a seven day a week newspaper the only peace is the few hours from the end of the print run till the early news and current affairs programs start.
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It is a question of perception.

Chief Minister Kate Carnell has been quite cross recently with our Assembly reporter Kirsten Lawson. Carnell feels that her message is not going through; that Lawson is biased and is beating up the Bruce Stadium issue; that Lawson is not presenting the Government’s case fairly.

The following day, former Carnell Liberal Minister and now Canberra United MLA Trevor Kaine chimed in.

He wrote, “”Kirsten Lawson in her article Bruce funding is the main game (CT, May 22, p.C3) refers to the revelations this week that it was Cabinet which approved the spending on Bruce, back in December 1997 while Kaine himself was still in Cabinet.

“”This is yet another case of the media picking up on the spin from Mrs Carnell’s office and repeating it as gospel and in some way relevant to the matter of unauthorised spending on Bruce Stadium.”

Delightful stuff. At once, Lawson is both the curse of the Chief Minister’s office and its mouthpiece for uncritically regurgitating its spin.
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The Budget lock-up of journalists has been an annual ritual for some decades.

It may have passed its used-by date.

Before Paul Keating deregulated the financial markets and before indexation became the vogue it might have had a point. In those days a sudden excise levy, devaluation of taxation change might have caused runs on money markets or even supermarkets. Perhaps that was why the Budget speech was done in the evening, so that no-one could go out a buy or sell. Now we have 24-hour money markets and 24-hour super-markets.

The journalists’ lock-up was primarily there to give journalists time to absorb the Budget papers and be ready to put the information out on air or to the press without enabling them to leak out crucial market information that would give an unfair disadvantage.
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The editor of the Northern Star in Lismore, Dean Gould, describes his readers as the poor, the old and the idle.

He was talking to a conference of editors and others organised by the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association last weekend.

Lismore has some unfortunate statistics. It has the highest unemployment rate, the highest rate of old people, the lowest income and the lowest education of anywhere in NSW.

Gould’s journos, though, are completely different. For a start they all have jobs. Most are young and all have well above the average income. Gould argued that the journalists were becoming too detached from their readers. Their talk of holidays in Europe and Thailand was alien to readers struggling to get a couple of weeks in the Evans Head Caravan Park.
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Inconsistency is still condemned in politics. It is a weapon for both journalists and other politicians. We had some entertaining examples this week with the deal between the Government and the Democrats over the GST.

Fear not, this column is not about the GST. Rather it is about consistency.

Labor said, “”Ha, ha, ha, you said a tax exemption for food was a Bad Thing a month ago. Now after dealing with the Democrats you say a tax exemption on food is the best thing since … er …. sliced bread.”

Prime Minister John Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello squirmed.
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Flights to Cairns daily by major airlines.

Nimrod III (20m x 8m) leaves Cairns Tuesday afternoons arriving Lizard Island Saturday. Then depart Lizard for one-hour low flight over reef back to Cairns. (Or the trip can be done in reverse starting with the flight to Lizard on Saturday.) Four nights aboard (air con cabins). All meals. 10 or 11 dives with divemaster above or below. Diving gear $50 extra. Snorkellers and sight-seers welcome.

Property values and rates excite the interest of Canberrans more than any other news story.

Rates raise about $100 million, about a fifth of local revenue.

In the past five years there has been a debate about fairness of rating systems. One argument suggests that every household uses similar municipal services — two bins per house whether in Isaacs or Isabella Plains. The other argument is that those people who live in places where property values are high should pay more because they can afford it. That, in turn is countered by the argument that as people wishing to stay in the inner areas grow old, their income drops while their property values rise. High rates might force them out.
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Ithink the world would be a better place without McDonald’s or Microsoft.

According to views put to courts on either side of the Atlantic, one sells food that is bad for you by youth who are exploited and the other abuses its monopoly position to force you to buy or use inferior computer software.

The court cases have the same genesis – an objection to excessive corporate power. They also have a similar cause – the law giving the large corporation far too much power in the first place. And in both cases this week the corporations had incremental losses.

But there are fundamental differences between the cases. In the McDonald’s case, the large corporation is suing two unemployed people who had the temerity to hand out leaflets outside a McDonald’s outlet. (I hesitate to use the word restaurant.) The leaflet contained a range of allegations, some of which were extravagant, such as that McDonald’s poisons people, and some of which were true of fair comment such as that McDonald’s food will contribute to heart disease and that it exploits children with its advertising.
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The cry has gone out for minimum sentences in the ACT.

It comes after Justice Terence Higgins gave bonds to two heroin users who threatened a 73-year-old woman with a blood-filled syringe. They had been convicted of aggravated burglary.

But it is too easy to take an isolated case and make judgments without having the full facts as the judge does. And it is too easy to bay for blood.

So rather than use this one case, as MLA Paul Osborne did, to call for a crackdown and minimum sentences, I thought I would look at a range of cases to see if Justice Higgins is as lenient as this sentence exemplifies.

Guess what? He is.

The past two years of The Canberra Times has been electronically searchable. We report nearly all sentences in the Supreme Court. I have got the most recent 15 or so sentences we reported by Justice Higgins and Justice John Gallop.
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Aconference in Canberra last week was told of a “”crisis” in legal aid.

Don’t be fooled. There is no crisis in legal aid, but there is a more worrying trend which is only made worse by more legal aid.

Fortunately, the Federal Attorney-General, Daryl Williams has kept his head while all around bay for more money which, if past experience is any guide, will just go into a bottomless pit. The legal profession will absorb whatever funds are available and still call for more.

The “”crisis” is being viewed from the wrong angle. There is no crisis in legal aid. Rather there is a crisis in dispute resolution.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more expensive, time-consuming method of dispute resolution than the British system of justice. And the same can be said about determining guilt.

At the time of the conference a fraud trial in the ACT Supreme Court was stayed indefinitely because the accused could not get legal aid. This was cited as a symptom of the legal-aid crisis. Nonsense. You need to look at it the other way. It is because our system of trials is so long and complicated that they are too expensive for legal aid to fund.

Let us not increase legal aid. Let us reduce the complexity of criminal trials and let us use better systems than the adversary system to resolve disputes.
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