Crispin Hull

Australia has a unique public broadcasting system. Unlike nearly all others it restricts advertisements to self-promotion in the case of the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal and to top or tail advertisements in the case of SBS.

Earlier this week, suggestions were made that advertisements be allowed on the ABC to help the Government make up its promised cut in $8 billion in public spending. It would seem perverse, that after four decades of television and more in radio that advertisements were needed to keep the ABC afloat. The ABC and Australia have been through far worse economic times than at present yet remained advertisement-free. The suggestion to put advertisements on ABC says more about ideology and values of government than tough economic times.

Advertisements would not help a great deal. They might make about $30 million in a total ABC expenditure of $500 million. Advertisers are not interested in paying huge amounts of money for time slots in programs without huge audience reach. To take advertisements … either in general or as top and tail only … would result in little money for the huge non-financial loss of uninterrupted quality programming.
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The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, Michael Rozenes, QC, has issued an ominous warning about Australia’s criminal-justice system. He has said that the complexity and inefficiency of the system had driven up costs to the extent that it was becoming too costly to prosecute white-collar criminals. The cost and complexity had, he argued, increased the justice of the system, but it meant there was a danger that those “”with the wit and guile to commit complex crimes” and who could afford good lawyers would be able to make the cost of prosecution too great to pursue.

Mr Rozenes warning comes at a time of large cut-backs in Commonwealth funding. However, it was not a plea for extra funds or more people to do the job. Rather it was a sensible questioning of the outdated procedure and rules of evidence used in criminal trials. It is not the first time Mr Rozenes has expressed his frustration at the failure of the system to deal with white-collar crime. In the past he has criticised company regulators for enabling corporate wrong-doers to escape criminal prosecution for breaches of corporations law by letting them off with civil penalties.

Mr Rozenes’ latest warning is more profound. He says that as the system becomes more just, it also becomes more expensive, so expensive that prosecuting authorities will be unable to pursue complex white-collar crimes. One can take issue that this will merely bring the justice system into disrepute. One could argue that a system so expense to run that guilty people escape conviction is not one that is becoming more just; rather it is become less just.
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This week and next week Canberra hosts the Australian Science Festival. The timing could not be better _ a time when many people in the rest of Australia are being falsely presented with a view that Canberra is a place full of useless public servants whose pruning will save the national economy. Hundreds of visitors, mostly schoolchildren, from throughout Australia will see the city in a different light _ as a creative place, as a place that expresses national aspirations.

The festival has an extraordinary array of activities and presentations that reveal the nation as a remarkably technologically and scientifically creative one. It will help present a message (perhaps indirectly) to the national government about the importance of science. That message is one that says the national government must maintain, through the universities and other institutions, a strong pure research base. Only government can do it because the rewards are too long-term for industry to be interested.
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The Queen is 70 today. Her 70th birthday is a reminder that Prince Charles will succeed her before long, and it is a prospect that not many Britons face with great cheer. The Queen’s children have let her down badly. It is not that three of the four have separated, but the manner in which several of the parties have conducted themselves since their separations. The have turned the Royal family into an object of tabloid press entertainment. But there are serious consequences. The separation of Charles and Diana and that of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, of themselves, were not profoundly destructive. After all, Princess Anne and the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, separated and divorced their husbands with a semblance of quiet dignity and the two husbands, Mark Phillips and Lord Snowdon, did not engage in the destructive, public antics that Fergie and Diana have. Charles and Diana sought out friends of friends in the press to pursue their vendetta against each other. Both lost, and so did the monarchy.

As a consequence, opinion polls in Britain are showing increasing doubts about the monarchy and Prince Charles’s succession. Only 41 per cent think Prince Charles is up to the job. A majority think the monarchy will not last another 50 years. None the less a majority still favour the monarchy over its replacement by some form of republican government. That support can clearly be put down to the dignity and grace of the Queen, despite the antics of her family. That was displayed admirably in the nation’s grief over the shootings of schoolchildren in the Scottish town of Dunblane. In that instance, the Queen played the classic role of a constitutional monarch … as a symbol for the whole nation, above and apart from grubby party politics. Incidentally, the Queen’s support on that occasion came from Princess Anne and Princess Margaret, showing that divorce of itself is not the difficulty.

The Queen’s role at Dunblane was the sort of role that many Australians would like to see for an Australian Head of State, without the family baggage that goes with it.
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President Bill Clinton has been treading on egg shells in Asia. In Japan he has called for a greater role for Japan in security beyond Japan’s borders. He meant not only a greater role for Japan in countering low-level threats like terrorism but also in continuing with US bases in Japan to maintain the strategic balance in the area. He said that if the bases were to go, it would allow North Korea to upset the balance. When he cited North Korea upsetting the balance, there was a clear implication that he meant China as well. Japan has agreed, putting aside the popular dissent against US bases, particular in Okinawa where a teenager was raped by three US servicemen. Japan signed a new security arrangement called “”an Alliance of the 21st Century”. It leaves the level of US troops in Japan at 47,000 and acknowledges that the US should keep about 100,000 troops in the Asia-Pacific region … presumably to contain China. China, of course, does not like the implication.

In the meantime, Mr Clinton’s Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, has been looking at China in a different light. He has been coaxing China to become an agent of peace in the region. He wants China to join four-party talks on a Korean peace agreement. The other three parties would be North and South Korea and the United States. Mr Christopher has used a stopover in the Netherlands to meet the Chinese Foreign Minister, Qian Qichen, to persuade him to help set up the talks.
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The Federal Government should seize the opportunity given by Australia’s peak welfare body that would not oppose the introduction of a goods and services tax (GST) as part of a comprehensive review of the tax system. This week the president of the Australian Council of Social Service, Robert Fitzgerald said the council had never rejected the concept of a consumption tax, but rather the style proposed by the coalition in its 1993 Fightback package.

Mr Fitzgerald’s comments widen the horizon for the Coalition. After it lost the 1993 election, a GST in any shape of form was off the political agenda. No-one dared go near it. On the two occasions when oblique references were made to it by the GST, Labor attempted to rerun its scare campaign. It was a shame that the GST was so comprehensively damned, because despite its politically unacceptability at the time, it is a better and fairer tax than has been painted. The main fear in 1993 was that any new tax is bad because history shows us that new taxes are rarely replacements for existing taxes, they are usually additions. However, as it turned out, Labor’s increase in the overall tax take between 1993 and 1996 was greater than would have been taken by the GST.

Mr Fitzgerald rightly suggested that a GST must be part of overall tax reform. He pointed out that his body opposed the Fightback package which contained a GST, not just because of the GST, but because the overall package would have resulted in substantial decreases to welfare payments and community services. He said that widening the tax base to include taxes on goods and services would be acceptable to his group. The Coalition might agree with that, but it would oppose any overall tax increase.
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It was important, symbolically, for the new Government to apply some of the “”end of days of waste and sloth” to itself. It has done this in two ways. The first was to cut the pay of Ministers outside Cabinet by $10,000. The second was to reduce the number of ministerial staffers from 455 to 379.

It seems that since 1988, a form of Parkinson’s Law has applied … the number of people employed has increased by the amount of extra space available for them in the new Parliament House.

The $10,000 pay cut is quite justifiable, even though the saving is a modest $130,000 a year. Different work should attract different pay, and it was important for the Government to reduce the pay of the outer ministry rather than increase the pay of the inner ministry.
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It is welcome news that the High Court will rule on the Wik and Thayorre land and native title claims without them first going to the Full Federal Court. Delay adds to uncertainty and costs which is not helpful to the claimants or to those who assert existing title. Ever since the Mabo judgment in 1992, there has been uncertainty as to whether an existing pastoral lease was enough to extinguish the common law native title that the High Court in that case. The Commonwealth’s Native Title Act two years later did not resolve the issue. It deliberately put it in the too-hard basket, leaving it for the courts to decide.

The upshot is bound to be unsatisfactory. For a start there are several types of pastoral lease and a myriad of facts, circumstances and legal provisions that apply differently to each. The High Court cannot and will not give a definitive, overall view. That is not its role. It can only rule on the facts of the cases before it. And what pertains to a 19th century lease in Queensland may not pertain to a post-war lease in Western Australia.
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Greg Cornwell has floated the idea of increasing the number of members of the Legislative Assembly at a very inopportune time. Of course, it is never opportune to think of increasing the number, salaries or conditions of politicians.

As it happens the ACT elects the fewest number of politicians per head than any state or territory, by far. The Assembly covers both state and local-government functions.

Mr Cornwell argues that the small number of MLAs and the small ministry is not good for government, and that $700,000 would be money well spent on four more MLAs and increasing the ministry from four to five. The advantages of a fifth ministry would be to spread the portfolios among more MLAs. The difficulties of multiple portfolios have been seen by both sides since self-government. Health and Education were difficult for Gary Humphries; sport, health and industrial relations were hard for Wayne Berry and now Treasury, Health and Chief Minister are a handful for Kate Carnell.
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Canberra is facing interesting times. The new Federal Government seems intent on cutting the Public Service substantially. Federal Public servants comprise about a third of Canberra’s workforce. It would be naive to imagine that the cuts will be prevented by some Sir Humphreyesque juggling as in the early years of the Fraser Government; the experience in Victoria shows what might happen.

Figures suggested have been as high as 20,000. As about a quarter of the service is in Canberra, that might mean around 5000 jobs here. Then there is a multiplier effect on the private sector that supports those public servants.

It is not a pretty picture. It means Canberrans must look at what we have got in the city and how to develop it to cushion the blow and to ensure that as many young people as possible will be able to find work here.
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