Crispin Hull

One of the main reasons for the IRA’s success … if maiming, killing and property destruction can be described as such … has been its organisation into very small cells. It has meant that captured IRA suspects were incapable of giving too much away because they knew so little and knew so few people up the chain of command. It countered the potential for losing control that such a system had by a rigid discipline code, meting out knee-capping or death to those who misbehaved. British intelligence estimated that in the 25 years of violence in Northern Ireland and the mainland, perhaps as few as 200 IRA operatives at any one time were responsible for all the death and destruction … and average of two deaths a week and untold millions in economic damage.

The Royal Ulster Constabulary started to make inroads into the IRA in the mid-1980s, extracting the so-called super-grasses who had had enough and traded information and evidence for immunity. But it only partially stopped the IRA. The cessation of violence only came when the IRA agreed to it 17 months ago. That agreement was presented by what has been called the IRA’s political wing, the Sinn Fein. Throughout the 17 months, the British and Irish Governments and the unionist and moderate Catholic parties in Northern Ireland imagined that when Sinn Fein spoke, the IRA was speaking; that Gerry Adams was speaking for the IRA.
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The United States and Taiwan should behave with much more caution towards China. They are too complacent about the likelihood of China attacking Taiwan. For more than 40 years, mainland China has tolerated a situation under which it has had no control over Taiwan or the people who live there, largely because a fiction has been maintained that there is one China and that Taiwan is a mere rebellious province of it. The importance of maintaining that fiction should not be under-estimated.

For more than two decades, mainland China preferred isolation to recognition of Taiwan, demanding that nation recognise only one China. Eventually, its patient insistence paid off as nation after nation abandoned Taiwan in favour of the government in Beijing. The leaders in Beijing think that one day China will be reunified and that Taiwan will once again be part of a single China. It may seem fanciful or naive, but it is the reality of their thinking and the US and Taiwan must take it into consideration in their actions. They will not forsake easily what they see as the gains of 40 years.

At present the government in Taipei at least formally holds the position that one day there will be a unified China. This is a ground for not recognising Taiwan as an independent nation when otherwise general principles of international law would demand it. However, this may change after March 23 when Taiwan holds its first democratic presidential elections. The legitimacy engendered by the election may make it a prelude to dropping the pretence that there can be one China and a formal declaration of independence.
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It is extremely unfortunate that changes to Medicare are being proposed in the climate of the election-campaign auction. Labor has offered cash rebates to people for various medical services not covered by Medicare, but they are restricted to services to children and are means tested. Labor will also build a medical school in north Queensland. The total cost is about $368 million a year. Miraculously, Prime Minister Paul Keating has promised no increase in the Medicare levy. But Labor has made and broken that promise twice before.

The Coalition is yet to present its health policy.

While it is important for the major parties to put forward policies at election time, the complexities of health delivery require more than a grubby auction. This week’s cash-in-hand promise is little more than a bribe. And public expenditure is not a magic pudding. Slices of spending cannot be continuously extracted and the pudding revert to a whole pudding again by magic.
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The United Nations is in strife. The idealism may well still there; but the realism is not. The UN will have no more cash left on December 31 and will be $A560 million in debt.

Members states are asking the United Nations to pay out and spend more than it is taking in yet those very members are not paying their dues. Only 25 states have paid up for 1996 on time, leaving 160 states in arrears. They total $A4.4 billion. The biggest debtor, the United States, owes $A1.6 billion. The US pays about a quarter of the UN’s finances.

The mood in the US Congress has been hostile the UN for quite some time. US members of Congress have objected to UN resolutions that ran counter to US foreign policy and have objected to what they see as waste at the UN headquarters in New York. But they have failed to balance that against the UN’s good works. Nor have they balanced the UN record’s against the US’s own fairly pitiful record as policeman of the world.
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Wayne Goss has been forced to see sense. Faced with the likelihood of an electoral backlash, he has backed away from asking the Governor, Leneen Forde, for a general election in the face of Labor’s loss of the pivotal seat of Mundingburra in the by-election at the weekend.

Having lost the seat, Labor has 44 seats, the Coalition 44 and there is one pro-Coalition Independent, Liz Cunningham. In short, Labor has lost its majority. Mr Goss faced two obstacles if he wanted to cling to power. The first was the good sense of the Governor who could easily have refused a request for a general election, given that there had been one such a short time ago and that the by-election was just a formalising or finishing off of that process. The second was that the electorate would have seen through the ploy and voted against Labor even more heavily, leaving Labor in even more difficult circumstances at the next election.

None the less, Mr Goss is determined to hang on to some power. He wants to retain the Labor Party leadership, even if that inevitably means as Leader of the Opposition. He has pre-empted opponents within his parliamentary party by calling a meeting of his parliamentary party for tomorrow (THURS) at which he will declare the leadership vacant and recontest it himself. This gives very little time for others, in particular Health Minister Peter Beattie, to shore up their votes. It also means that MPs will be voting during a hiatus, while still technically in government but on the verge of a no-confidence motion. It smacks of trickery.
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The results of the current round of wage negotiations between the ACT Government and its employees must break earlier patterns. Two elements of the unions’ demands should not be acceptable to the Government or the taxpayers of the ACT. The first is that they have claimed a 9 per cent rise, which is about 4.5 per cent above inflation. The second is that they have made an across-the-service claim.

Gone are the days when unions could put their hands out for more money without offering better value work and then launch a program of blackmail and disruption till they get it. Governments should resist this approach. Pay rises should not be automatic, but should be earned. That means greater productivity or greater efficiency through more flexible working arrangements. Clearly, those cannot be made across the whole service. Some workers will be more willing or more able to offer more than others.
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It is sad that in making comments about whether Australia should go to Sri Lanka for its opening World Cup cricket game there was so little emphasis on or indeed empathy with the people of Sri Lanka whose lives have been so profoundly affected by the on-going violence in the country. Some of the media emphasis, too, has been misdirected. The approach was that a precious cricket game was being so inconveniently disrupted. The fact that more than 70 people died in the bomb blast last week in Colombo got an incidental second place. It was as if the recent Sri Lankan cricket tour counted for nothing in terms of generating ties between nations and people. The visiting team may as well have been robots.

The Sri Lankan Government has accused the Tamil Tigers of the attack on the Central Bank, but the Tigers have not claimed responsibility. The attack marks a further turn in the 14-year war for independence for the Tamil area in the north and east of Sri Lanka which has claimed 50,000 lives. Last year the Government took the rebel stronghold of Jaffna. About 500 government troops and 2000 rebels died in the 50-day battle.
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The new Premier of Quebec, Lucien Bouchard, wants a re-run or last year’s referendum of whether Quebec should separate from the rest of Canada. In that referendum, Quebec can within a trifling 50,000 votes (less than 1 per cent) of deciding to separate. Mr Bouchard, the new leader of the Quebec separatist party which has a majority in the Quebec provincial parliament, argues that Canada is “”two profoundly different nations who shortly must decide upon their destiny”.

He said the best solution for Quebec would be to have sovereignty and be in partnership with Canada, presumably with some sort of free-trade and defence arrangement. To some extent he is right. There will never be rest until Quebec has some sort of sovereignty that satisfies the French-speaking part of Quebec.
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The leader of the Australian Democrats, Cheryl Kernot, made some sound points in her party’s charter to reform government processes and improve public access to information.

Senator Kernot has rightly called for an independent parliamentary budget office to do its own fiscal analyses. The public would no longer have to rely on the executive to get information about what the executive is doing with the money. It is true that Labor has improved some of the standards of budgetary performance, in particular creating forward estimates. But it has still been guilty of fudging the figures, making its performance appear better than it really is. The value of an independent information provider is well exemplified in the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which is created by a statute that guarantees its independence.

Other elements in Senator Kernot’s charter include: steps against jobs for the boys, truth in electoral advertising, a parliamentary commissioner to deal with MPs’ standards, parliamentary approval for treaties, more independence for the Speaker and Senate President, fixed terms for Parliament and cutting the Senate’s power to reject supply.
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The recent rulings of the Tax Office on child care which came to light this week demand the immediate attention of whichever party forms government after March 2.

A lot of the complexities of the tax law have grown up in the past two decades because of the incessant game played between government and business over maximising and minimising the tax. Every trick played by business and every loophlole exploited results in complex legislation to overcome them. The complex and detailed fringe benefits and capital gains taxes are good examples of governmental responses to business and highly paid employees overcoming income tax.

While the tax game centres around company cars, obscure off-shore trusts, deferred dividends and the like, one can bemoan the inefficiency of it, but essentially business (collectively) has brought a lot of it one its own head. However, when one is dealing with imposing fringe-benefits tax on some child-care provided by employers (even as salary sacrifice), the argument takes on a different character.
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