Crispin Hull

The evidence is coming in that falls in the road toll and the number of traffic accidents in the past five years is not a call for self-congratulation on the part of Australian drivers. Rather it has been a incident of economic recession. This has meant people have cut down on the frequency and length of their car trips and have not replaced their cars as frequently. It has added up to fewer accidents costly less in terms of money, injuries and lives. Alas, it is not evidence that more drivers are voluntarily driving more carefully.

The latest evidence is from the insurance group AAMI which publishes an annual crash index. It shows that as Australia has been coming out of recession over the past three years, the accident rate has increased by 15 per cent. It shows that half the accidents are caused by rear-end collisions and not giving way … in short, driver negligence. Given total accident property costs of $2.6 billion, it is safe to assume that more than $1 billion a year is caused by this sort of driver negligence.

The AAMI index showed that in the past year the accident rate rose from 13.9 per cent to 14.4 per cent. That probably shows longer trips as we come out of the recession and/or more crashes per kilometre.
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In the six months before an election is due, Australian politics shows lots of movement and no direction; all heat and no light. Important and difficult decisions are put on hold. In their place foolish promises are frequently made to special (and usually undeserving) minorities because they might deliver votes.

In this environment the Australian wine industry awaits the Government’s response to the Industry Commission report on wine. The chair of the commission, Bill Scales, recommended that wine tax go up from 26 per cent to 32 per cent. Admittedly it was a minority report. However, if it enough to send chilly winds through the investment climate in the industry.

The president of the Wine-makers Federation of Australia, Stephen Shelmerdine, says that the Government has had the report for three months. It is plenty of time to reply. To date the Government has only hinted that it will do nothing. That is not enough. Investors hate uncertainty.
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The people of Canberra have shown a stubborn liking for glass milk bottles. It is hard to tell whether that is because of a belief that glass containers are more environmentally friendly or whether they think the milk tastes better from taste-neutral glass than from waxed cardboard cartons.

In any event, the Act Milk Authority should not be allowed to get away with eliminating the glass option by stealth or what it thinks is benign neglect. It would be all to easy for the authority to use the excuse of the current worn bottle-washing equipment to phase out glass bottles. The worn bottle-washing equipment is increasing the risk of glass particles falling in bottles. The authority says there is a health risk and in that circumstance distribution should cease till the problem is fixed.
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Last year the High Court ruled in favour of freedom of political communication. In effect, it means no more easy defamation politicians. It removed one of the greatest impediments to reform of defamation law … the self-interest of politicians who had most to gain from a restrictive law. Their conduct was less open to comment and they could pick up defamation damages.

Politicians are now more likely to think, that if it is good enough for us to be subject to a free-speech regime, it is good enough for everyone else.

So reform is now more likely, but it must be the right sort of reform. Last week, the NSW Law Reform Commission reported. It recommended that the onus of proof which presently falls on publishers to prove the truth of what they publish be reversed. It would mean plaintiffs would have to prove the falsity of the publication. This has problems.
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The wording of the Constitution and the war enabled the Feds to take away income tax from the states and we are now suffering the consequences. It means the states have to go cap in hand to Feds to get tax money they should have raised themselves and each can blame each other when voters whinge about high taxes or low services. Further the Federal Government has built up a large duplicate bureaucracy to ensure its money (which is really the states money being reimbursed) is properly spent.

Last week the federal Coalition said it was going to do something about it. Prime Minister Paul Keating immediately said it meant state income taxes and … shock, horror … a state GST. As if the state petrol, tobacco and booze taxes were not a GST anyway. Besides, broadening state consumption taxes would run into constitutional strife because Section 90 gives the Commonwealth the exclusive right to levy excise taxes (in layperson’s language this means sales taxes). The High Court has only tolerated booze, smokes and petrol taxes as historic accidents.
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One of the bad practices of Tudor monarchs in the 16th century is to be repeated in the Albert Hall next week. The Tudors used to replenish their coffers every now and then by selling monopoly rights to engage in certain trades. Sometimes they would just give the monopoly rights to mates. It caused great agitation among the good traders of England, but to defy it could result in fines, imprisonment or death.

It was only with the arrival of the Stuarts that the traders and Parliament were powerful enough to get the Crown’s rights restricted with the passing of the Statute of Monopolies in 1623, which restricted monopolies to inventions, and even then only for about 15 years.

Since then, Crown monopolies have re-emerged in a different form … the licence. Parliament has allowed the Executive to licence some activities to the exclusion of other practitioners for a hefty fee.
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Plants have resisted attacks by animals to eat them in various ways. Most notably, they have grown thorns or thrown off toxic chemicals. It has taken millions of years through the processes of natural selection. But plants, like animals are still organic. They cannot produce chemicals of such toxicity that in killing animals they kill themselves. Thus they sometimes produce chemicals that will merely scare some animals off. Various chillies contains chemicals that result in sensible animals (non-Mexicans) not coming back for a second bite. Marijuana plants, poppies and the coca plant contain chemicals that cause animals that eat them some cause for not returning.

Some of the chemicals have different effects in different animals … poisonous to one, beneficial to another, toxic to tumour cells benign to other cells, inducing addictive euphoria in one species and having no effect on another.

They are there. They are part of the biological struggle between species on earth. It is difficult to see how they can ever be eradicated.
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There are statistics on victims of crime, reported crime and punished crime but no statistics on crime itself. This is _ obviously _ because a lot of crime goes unreported. As a result, people use statistics on reported crime and punished crime (convictions) as a substitute. It may seem reasonable, but it is not.

We know, for example, despite a surge in reports of sexual assault, that the underlying rate has not fluctuated much. General surveys of the population about whether people had been a victim of a crime indicate that. It is just that changes of attitude in police forces, the courts and society in general make reporting a less traumatic experience, so more victims are willing to report. Contrarily, as insurance companies lifted their excess, reportage of theft and malicious damage fell, but the underlying rate probably remained the same. In short, reporting figures are rubbery. Now it seems that conviction figures can also be as misrepresentative.
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In December last year The Canberra Times published an article by me expressing concern about the Merit Protection Review Agency’s investigation at the Australian War Memorial.

Essentially, that article said there was something irregular about the way the process was put in train. The minister in charge of the public service, Gary Johns, launched it without the knowledge of the Minister in charge of the memorial, Con Sciacca. It said the agency, normally a body that defends public servants subject of disciplinary procedures, was now put in a prosecutorial role to investigate harassment, but without the normal safeguards of fairness that prosecutors normally apply.

In short, the article said the process was flawed and had delivered an injustice to the director and deputy director of the memorial.
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