Crispin Hull

The Prime Minister, John Howard, will have a difficult time making changes to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission following allegations of financial irregularities against various state Aboriginal Legal Services, and a damning report by the Commonwealth Ombudsman.

At present the body has 17 elected members and 2 appointed by the Minister. The Minister can appoint to chair from among them. But the amendments to remove the ministerial appointments to make it an all-elected body which elects its own chair come into force on July 1 and take practical effect from the first ATSIC election after that. They are, to use the words of the former Prime Minister, L-A-W law.

Mr Howard, and his Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, John Herron, have announced that want to continue to appoint the chair. They also want an overriding ministerial capacity to suspend the board and appoint an administrator if the Minister thinks the board is being mismanaged and a special audit process for ATSIC spending. To achieve the first two the Government must get amendments through the Parliament, and in the face of a hostile Senate some compromise will be needed.
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The Victorian Premier, Jeff Kennett, has given an uncharacteristically moderate response to the report of the Drug Advisory Council, chaired by Professor David Penington.

The report says despite extra resources, greater penalties and greater in-roads to civil liberties over the past two decades, authorities have not cut the supply of drugs. It called for different approaches, notably decriminalisation of marijuana for own use and treatment of heroin addiction as a health problem, not a criminal one. Mr Kennett called on Victorians to tells their MPs what they thought over the next month and that there would be a conscience vote on the issue. Importantly, he did not dismiss the change of policy out of hand. His approach is markedly different from the Federal Minister for Health, Michael Wooldridge, who said he was not optimistic about the proposed ACT heroin trial (to provide heroin under supervision to addicts), because of resistance in Victoria and NSW.
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The Kingston foreshore-Acton land swap project is likely to a big test for the ACT Government, Opposition, cross-benchers, federal and ACT planning authorities and the new federal minister for territories, Warwick Smith.

It is a large project involving a lot of public money and public assets. It is also going to engage a lot of private investment. Such projects have often been recipes for financial catastrophe, and there are any number of examples in recent Australian history. It is usually the long-suffering taxpayers who miss out. But with care, good management and planning, there is nothing wrong with the grand vision and public and private sector partnerships.

But the warning signs are there in Kingston. While the public-sector bodies are shuffling about the private sector has sniffed the wind of opportunity. The lease of one parcel of land has been sold and there are others nearby. The present lease purpose clauses are for ferries and buses. The new owners have bought subject to approval for a change in lease purpose … to a much more profitable purpose, especially in light of all the projected public investment in the area.
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If 24 people had been killed in an earthquake, cyclone, air crash, fire, industrial accident, mine or virtually any other way, news media would go berserk. As it is they were killed on the roads at Easter. If anything the deaths got slightly more attention than usual, because the holiday period has been otherwise fairly quiet.

The great tragedy is that nearly all the 2000 or so deaths each year on Australian roads (and the 20,000 or so injuries) are largely preventable.

It is true that the toll has dropped from a decade ago. It is difficult to say precisely why … probably a combination of better cars, better roads, higher penalties for breaking the law, more certainty of being caught and more compulsory safety requirements. The reduction in the past decade, improvements in accidental deaths and a general reduction in risk-taking activities such as smoking show it is possible to change human behaviour for the better and it shows that the effort is worth it because of the avoidance of human suffering and the economic advantages.
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Expediency comes before consistency in Australian politics. For decades the Coalition parties have championed states’ rights and the benefits of devolving power to the states to avoid duplication. For years they have denounced the Federal Labor Government for … as they would say … abusing the foreign affairs power in the Constitution to intrude into areas traditionally the preserve of the states.

Then they get into government. The high-sounding principles are discarded and one of their first laws is to use the foreign-affairs power to override state employment law. The Coalition has said it will use international labour and political covenants that enshrine freedom of association to overturn law proposed by the NSW government to give preference to unionists.

Now, compulsory unionism is an anathema and any law that insists an employer preference to a unionist over anyone else when hiring is discriminatory. However, the Coalition’s use of the foreign affairs-power and its overriding of state law is rank hypocrisy. It is using the end to justify a means which it has condemned in the past. If it had acknowledged that governments should be able to call on all constitutional powers to pursue their political aims, then no-one could quarrel.
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We must be grateful to Independent Michael Moore and Labor and Green MLAs for their great concern over the games we play. It is obvious that playing paintball will lead to the hard stuff. Once they try paintball people will want the real thing. They’ll want bullets. They’ll want to kill people. And once they are allowed to drop washable paint in paddocks, where will it end? Farmers might use the precedent and demand to paint fences and sheds instead of leaving them in their natural state as they should.

And the people of the ACT clearly should be prevented from any possibility of hurting themselves while they engage in recreation. Where will it end? People might want to throw leather balls at each other with only the protection of a piece of willow to fend it off. They might want to engage in the dangerous practice of attaching wheels to their feet. Or worse, they might join together to see if they can get a larger piece of leather over a line that has been … shock, horror … PAINTED on the grass, and non-native grass at that.
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Dick Smith is understandably annoyed that the $2 million helicopter he offered to the ACT as a rescue craft has been sitting idle in a hangar for 10 months while he has had to pay insurance and maintenance. He has decided to take it back to Sydney.

Mr Smith put the ACT Government in a bind 10 months ago. Not to accept the gift might have been seen a churlish or a stupid waste. But having accepted it, the Government should have had put in place a cogent plan to use the helicopter quite quickly in rescue work. The issue was complicated by a review of aero-medical services in NSW with the result that NSW decided to put a second rescue helicopter in the air based in Canberra. That would cost about $1 million a year, of which the ACT would pay between $100,000 and $150,000. That is a much cheaper solution that accepting Mr Smith helicopter, refitting it and paying full running costs.
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There has been a welcome breakthrough in the past week for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Serbia handed over two critical witnesses to the slaughter of unarmed Muslims and the Croatian Government said Bosnian Croat militia general Tihomir Blaskic would turn himself in to the tribunal. The tribunal has now indicted 57 people: 46 Serbs, eight Croats and 3 Muslims. Alas, only two are in custody.

It is now 50 years since the Nuremberg war-crimes trial. Since then, despite all the war, killings and breaches of human rights, there has been very little accounting. And when there is any accounting it is usually in the form of national courts, or special courts to deal with specific conflicts.

The horrific events in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, however, seem at last to be pricking the consciences of world leaders, and the United Nations is closer to taking a step which should have been taken at its foundation … the establishment of a permanent international criminal court with its own criminal code. Such a court would have a general jurisdiction to deal with cases arising from any conflict past or future.
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The allegations that ultra-sound facilities have been used at Woden Valley Hospital to treat pet dogs have resulted in a justifiable sense of outrage among Canberrans, particularly those on hospital waiting lists.

Initially it seemed that only one case was involved … a case of an animal in suffering with no vet available. That might have been treated with leniency as a one-off lapse of judgment and taste made with good, if misguided, intentions. However, it appears that the practice runs to more than one case. If so it shows an unacceptable contempt for patients who are waiting to use the facilities.
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Before some Watson residents whip themselves up into too much hysteria over the finding of arsenic-contamination in the soil of suburban gardens, as they appeared to be doing at the weekend, they should consider several points. Arsenic is a naturally occurring substance and unless you eat quite a lot of soil, there is no danger to health; it does not even transmit to vegetables grown in contaminated soil. Last year the Legislative Assembly’s Planning and Environment Committee heard from two toxicologists that the health of residents living near former sheep dip sites had not suffered anything from abnormal levels of arsenic in the soil. None was found in urine tests and it is an easily testable substance. That position still holds.

One of the troubles is that in a pre-election climate the Government offered to buy the houses of several residents in Theodore for well over market values, and in at least one case the offer was accepted. That has unfortunately become the benchmark. It might have been better if the toxicologists had been brought in before the pay-outs.
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