1999_04_april_leader16apr mlas pay

ACT Chief Minister Kate Carnell has put a submission to the Remuneration Tribunal that the Chief Minister and other MLAs should not get a pay rise. There is some irony in the submission. Out of all the 17 MLAs she is about the only one who could cut the mustard in the private sector and get more outside the Assembly than she gets inside.

Pay for Assembly Members presents a conundrum. If you pay peanuts you might get monkeys. If you get monkeys, the public does not want to pay them cashews, arguing that they deserve only peanuts. On the other hand, the payment for MLAs and quality of MLAs may not correlate. Good-quality people may have made enough money outside politics not to worry much about pay; their central concerns being public service, power, influence and other non-monetary concerns. Other good-quality people may not be very affluent and still not worry much about pay, regarding the rewards of public service enough – a good example of that is Sir William Deane, who upon being made Governor-General insisted on a pay reduction for the office. Adding to the difficulty is the possibility that if you make the pay rate higher it will attract people for the sake of the money not for the sake of doing a good job.
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1999_04_april_leader16apr electricity

The very foolish decision of the ACT Legislative Assembly not to permit the privatisation of the electricity retailing business of Actew appears to now be leading to further folly. The ACT Government, with one hard tied behind its back, is now negotiating a merger with Great Southern Energy which has about 240,000 customers in south-eastern NSW. Great Southern Energy is fully owned by the NSW Government. That Government, albeit a Labor one, is in the same boat as the ACT Government in that it, too, has been denied the chance to privatise, though in its case via party machination rather than legislative prohibition. Now both Governments are stuck with the grim prospect of entering a competitive electricity retailing market in the new financial year encumbered with the fetters of public ownership.

In the circumstances seeking a merger is about the best option available to the ACT Government, but the end result will be that the ACT Government will be part owner of a corporation distributing electricity in NSW. Surely, ACT taxpayers should not be involved in the business of interstate electricity distribution. And the question must be asked whether the ACT Government should be involved in retailing electricity in the ACT. Gone are the days when only government could undertake large scale distribution of utility products like telecommunications, electricity, gas and water. The private sector can do it better and pass on the fruits of competition to consumers.

Gas, which is similar to electricity, is distributed and retailed in the ACT by the private sector very efficiently.
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1999_04_april_leader15apr nsw new labor

The NSW Premier, Bob Carr, wants to kill off the factions in the Labor Party. Fresh from his election win he has announced a desire for the Labor Party in NSW to be more like the Labour Party in Britain where Tony Blair reinvigorated the party, leading it into government.

Mr Carr said he wanted to end branch-stacking, recruit new people, and change the ethos of the party to make its programs relevant to people who’ve never belonged to a trade union.

Mr Carr’s “”New Labor” would extend the base of traditional Labor – union members – with economic policies that allowed small business to prosper without radical changes to State industrial relations laws.

The idea makes good politics. The major party that captures the middle ground invariably wins government – Menzies and Wran are good examples. John Howard’s first campaign is also an example. A major party that gets too stepped in ideology or divided by ideological or faction brawls often loses – John Hewson in 1993 and pre-Whitlam Labor are good examples.
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1999_04_april_leader14apr yeltsin

Many in the west were quite unnerved by the sight of Russian President Boris Yeltsin blustering about the NATO bombing in Yugoslavia. “”I’ve told the NATO people, the Americans, the Germans: “Don’t push us into military action. Otherwise there would certainly be a European, and perhaps a world war.”

But Mr Yeltsin’s statement must be put into context. He is facing impeachment by the Russian Parliament. And just a US foreign policy was influenced by an impeachment against the US President, so is Russian foreign policy. It is a fairly standard ploy for a politician in trouble at home to invent or exaggerate some external threat. In the case of Mr Yeltsin, though, it will not work. The man who stepped on to a tank unarmed in 1991 to announce the end of the Soviet Union and communism to almost universal acclaim is eight years later almost universally detested. Faced with his obvious unpopularity, the critical members of Parliament responsible for the impeachment process will not be swayed by Mr Yeltsin’s empty threats, to the contrary.

One critical count of the five-count impeachment hearing which begins this week is that he launched the 1994-96 war in Chechnya. This is the count that the democratic opposition Yabloko faction supports. Mr Yeltsin can hardly expect to change their minds with talk of engaging in another war, this time over Serbia.
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1999_04_april_leader13apr pms lodge

The Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett is partly right. A new official residence should be built for the Prime Minister in Canberra. But he is wrong to suggest that an official residence need be built for the Prime Minister in Melbourne as well. Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and Hobart will join the queue.

The present lodge is “”dingy dark and out-of-date” according to Chief Minister Kate Carnell. Indeed a place fitting such a description seems ideally suited to be a residence for the Treasurer – a working residence close to Parliament House, very suited to the long haul of the Budget process. And the Treasurer should have a residence in Canberra.

The Prime Minister, on the other hand, should have a residence on the shore of Lake Burley Griffin with appropriate offices and where he or she could entertain international and national visitors.
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1999_04_april_leader13apr gst

Decision time for the GST is drawing dear. No doubt there will be a number of unforeseen consequences which will require fixing after the event. All the modelling and Senate inquiries in the world will not be able to fully predict human behaviour and the introduction of a new tax will inevitably affect economic behaviour which will in turn affect the impact of the tax. The Government has made the obligatory promise that no-one will be worse off. The promise is obligatory because in modern politics every interest group is capable of squealing disproportionately to any inconvenience change might bring. The promise is silly because inevitably such a major change cannot be beneficial to everyone. So the promise must be taken with a grain of salt.

Of more importance is the question of whether the tax changes overall will on balance be beneficial. The answer to that question is almost certainly yes. Australia must change its tax mix. It must broaden it to include services and it must tax the act or consumption more and the acts of wealth generation, like income and employment, less.

The last days of Senate hearings were taken up with the question of compensation for pensioners. As the Government had made a separate promise that the pension would reach 25 per cent of average weekly earnings, any compensation would get absorbed in that and they would be no better off under the GST. Indeed they would be worse off because their pension would not buy as much if food were taxed. This may be so. The answer would be to increase the pension promise a few percentage points to account for the GST, so that the pension would be 27 or 18 per cent of weekly earnings.

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1999_04_april_leader12apr refos

The offer by the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, to take 4000 refugees from Kosovo on its face was a better response than the initial response that that decision reversed made by the Minister for Immigration Philip Ruddock who had said Australia would take no refugees.

Australia should have responded with more generosity than what Mr Ruddock’s original announcement contained.

Nonetheless, later events have revealed that, in at least one respect, Mr Ruddock had a better feel for the situation than his Prime Minister. Mr Howard put a strong caveat on the Australian offer. The refugees were to be given visas for just three months and that there would be special legislation to ensure that the refugees could not get permanent residence. Apparently, there was some fear that there might be a repeat of events after Tienanmen (CHECK SPELLING) Square when 20,000 Chinese refugees in Australia got extension to visas which ultimately resulted in permanent settlement.
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1999_04_april_leader12apr boat aground

The image of the rusty, 40m, red-and-white fishing aground on a northern NSW beach is a symbol of embarrassment, even incompetence, for the authorities that are supposed to be responsible for the security of Australia’s coastline. It is one thing for the odd boatload of illegal immigrants to land on the remote north coast, or even for one to land in the less remote coast just north of Cairns as one did a couple of weeks ago. It is quite another matter for one to land, as this one did, in northern NSW. How did it slip through?

As the Opposition immigration spokesman on immigration, Con Sciacca, said, it is incomprehensible that a boat with more than 100 people on board could travel more than 2000km down the Australian east coast without detection.

But before the Opposition works itself into too much of a lather about the matter, it must remember that it has been an disciple, if not a major architect, in Australian naval defence strategy that is seeing us spend millions of dollars on new long-range submarines that will form part of the policy of forward defence and integration with US defence strategies while a rust bucket with illegal immigrants aboard can motor with immunity on to a tourist beach right next to a coastal township.
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1999_04_april_leader08apr timor

The hopes for a peaceful political settlement in East Timor after 24 years turmoil are now in jeopardy. Everything will now depend on the actions of at least nine key interests: five external and four internal.

The Indonesian Government, has at last recognised that the province is a huge economic burden. In 1975, faced with the possibility of a radical communist enclave in its midst was determined to annexe the province as its own. With the demise of the Cold War that threat evaporated. With the departure of President Suharto the last emotional and face-facing reasons for keeping the province fell away. President Jusuf Habibe prudently decided to allow the province to go its own way.

However, it is not as simple as that from the Indonesian point of view. The Indonesian Army does not necessarily think on all fours with the Indonesian Government. It is generally in favour of territorial integration. Ultimately it will go along with the Habibe Government, but it will be reluctant and wherever possible will push its own integrationist agenda. It is a worrying force.
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1999_04_april_leader08apr queensland and gst

The Victoria Premier Jeff Kennett has asserted that the Federal Government is guilty of a bias in favour of Sydney, and NSW in general.

Notice he did not say “”Canberra” is showing a bias towards Sydney and NSW, for it would have been absurd. On this isolated occasion when a state Premier is blaming the Federal Government for something, the metonymy “”Canberra” was not used. Australians can only hope the bias is a passing fad caused by the Olympics and the fact the Prime Minister is from Sydney and still resides there. But the Games will come and go and the next Prime Minister is most like to come from either Perth or Melbourne and the blessing of distance will require him to live in Canberra.

The popular view of history is that Canberra was created to resolve the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, so that neither would dominate the new federation. However, there is another element to this. The people of Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and Queensland wanted neither Sydney nor Melbourne to be capital. They wanted a neutral capital that could dispense national priorities without bias to any state.
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