Crispin Hull

Blocklines: 1. The residential freeway through inner Canberra that later NCDC designers would have avoided. 2. Kaleen . . . residents blessed with no direct traffic thoroughfare.

Subsequent bureaucrats have been damned for messing up the Burley Griffin plan. But Saint Walter was not infallible. He did not have the planning solution for everything in Canberra. Indeed his design has created some problems.

The subsequent bureaucrats did mess up the Triangle and cut the city from the lake with the ghastly Parkes Way, but they also created two special features of Canberra … the town centres and the clustered suburb. Both have reduced the blight of the car that has wrecked other cities.
Continue reading “1995_12_december_civic”

I wondered whether E stood for anything, like Edward or Evan. It was only later I found out why E was called E. There I was aged 16 on my first day at Tully’s cherry orchard just outside Beechworth. Mr Tully drove us up from the town in his ute. He was very much “”Mr Tully” to us. Sheer heaven. Cherries everywhere and you could eat as many as you wanted.

E pointed me to a large tree with branches dripping cherries. He left me three large wooden cases (the size of a banana box) and a metal bucket with some leather straps to put around my neck, and drove slowly off in the ute with the rest of the pickers in the back.

I picked and ate furiously. The metal bucket filled and I tipped it into the wooden box. Soon the case was full. We were paid a dollar a case. (And a 1967 dollar was worth, say, $15).
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There has been a vigorous debate, much of it behind closed doors, about what sort of person should be director of the Australian War Memorial. Should it be someone with military experience, someone with professional qualifications in history and or museum administration or a professional public-service manager capably of running anything?

Military people tend to be can-do type but can get themselves into strife when the crash through becomes crash, as exemplified by former director Air Vice-Marshal Jim Fleming.

The history-museum person can lose out by not having the political nous to extract money from the Government. For example, one of the leading runners for the job was former Museum of Australia director Margaret Coaldrake who could not overcome government pusillanimity to get that project off the ground in a coherent way at Yarramundi.
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Independent MLA Paul Osborne has expressed concerns about there being no legal prohibition against people under 18 serving alcohol to adult purchasers. Fortunately, his concern has been dismissed by the Attorney-General, Gary Humphries, for the wowserish, knee-jerk attempt at vote-catching it is.

There is nothing wrong with 15 to 18-year-olds serving alcohol in sealed containers in supermarkets and other outlets. Indeed, there is some merit in it. Those aged 15 to 18 have a far better idea of young people’s ages than middle aged people. The young people are better equipped to catch underage people buying alcohol.

Mr Osborne suggested that the young people would be under peer pressure to sell to their underage mates. It is an untested suspicion. Moreover, given that most supermarket sales are made in public and that under-18-year-old workers are usually under closer supervision by employers, it is unlikely.
Continue reading “1995_09_september_leader01sep”

The Isle of Dogs is sleeping a little easier. They naively imagine that, with the closure this week of the down-market leftish tabloid (ital) Today (end ital), the newspaper war is over.

(Incidentally, the watchdogs of democracy in Britain were formerly known by the collective noun “”Fleet Street”, but now many have moved both editorial and presses to the eastern docklands, in and near the Isle of Dogs, that is perhaps a better collective noun to describe them, though they have not put it into print themselves.)

The war began about a year ago when Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Times began to cut cover prices. And it has resulted in the man who started it closing one of his own newspapers, Today, which he bought from founder Eddy Shah in 1987. But save the tears. (Ital) Today (end ital) was no loss, either to Murdoch, or indeed to journalism. It was a tabloid with nominally centre-left views, articulated in the crass way of British tabloids. It had collected about $280 million in losses.
Continue reading “1995_11_november_ukpapers”

In London last night, Britain and Australia launched a major “”New Images” campaign to change the stereotypical images the people of each nation have of each other.

New Images will be a series of about 150 cultural, business and sporting projects, mostly in Australia, in 1997, the 50th anniversary of the presence of the British Council in Australia. It will be the largest event of its kind ever mounted by Britain.

The British Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, said at a function at Australia House, “”People do not understand the extent of the deep economic and cultural links between the two nations.”
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They are a delicate balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces. The central government keeps wanting more control and the parts keep wanting more autonomy.

Some parts are forced into a federation. Some of the parts join the federation to get security and economies of scale. Some feel regional differences are too great and prefer to keep full sovereignty or having joined a federation want to break away. It is often a balance between feeling and thinking.

Quebec is not a lone example. This week’s vote changes nothing. It is still more captive of centrifugal rather than centripetal forces. What can be done to get these forces back into balance?
Continue reading “1995_11_november_nzcan”

Native title is a fragile thing. It was made that much more fragile by a ruling by the Full Federal Court yesterday. The ruling will make native title claims on vast areas of Australia … those which have been or are under pastoral leases … much more difficult.

But miners and pastoralists should not start cheering immediately. The court painted a restrictive, administrative role for the Native Title Tribunal. If Aboriginal claimants do not like its processes at any time, they can still go to court to seek declarations of their title.

This was the very spectre of expensive, delay-causing court actions done parcel-by-parcel that dismayed pastoralists and miners after the original Mabo decision came down. It led at least some of them to support Paul Keating’s Native Title Bill in the hope that endless litigation could be avoided. Yesterday’s decision, on that count, will give them no joy.
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Few would have seriously expected the Chinese appeal court to do anything other than confirm both the conviction and sentence of Australian businessman James Peng. The only hope now is that Chinese authorities will have a change of heart and deport him, rather than make him serve the 18 year sentence, as they did earlier this year in the case of Harry Wu, the American human-rights campaigner.

Unfortunately, for Mr Peng his case is very different. Mr Peng appears to have incurred the personal ire of some people close to the Chinese leadership for out-smarting them in business matters. Mr Wu, on the other hand, was an idealist who upset the leadership in a general political way, not in a personal business way. Further, Mr Wu could draw on much greater clout from his home country.
Continue reading “1995_11_november_leader30nov”

Health centres have provided good service to the people of Canberra since the first such centres in Australia were set up 20 years ago. There is great merit in having a range of health services under one roof: GP, counselling, nutrition, immunisations and so on. However, health centres cannot succeed without the presence of at least one GP. If the GPs disappear, the health centres will inevitably follow.

The question arises, though, who is to pay for the presence of a GP? The ACT Government made a decision earlier this year that it was not a good use of ACT taxpayers money to provide salaries for doctors at health centres when there were other ways of providing a similar service, principally by cost-shifting to the Commonwealth. The ACT decided that it would cease paying salaries and negotiate with doctors to take over the health-centre practices as private practitioners. All pensioners and other benefit recipients would still pay nothing because they would come under the Commonwealth’s Medicare bulk-billing arrangements. Some other disadvantaged patients would also pay nothing if the doctor saw fit. Others would pay at least something per visit, unless the doctors decided to totally bulk-bill, but that would be unlikely as the trend is against this in Canberra.
Continue reading “1995_11_november_leader29nov”