Crispin Hull

One of the arguments against fixed-term parliaments is that with the election date known so far in advance, politicians would be electioneering for longer periods of time than with the system of the Prime Minister determining the election date and the length of the official campaign.

The two year extravaganza leading up to the first Tuesday in November for the US presidential election is cited as evidence of this.

It is a poor example for Australia. Events in the ACT are proving this argument against fixed terms to be nonsense.

Americans go through a primary (or pre-selection) process which involves a large number of ordinary voters. Here pre-selections are done in back rooms that used to be smoke-filled.
Continue reading “1994_07_july_actpol23”

Yowani Golf Club plans to build a 230-dwelling housing estate on its lease, drawing fire from Independent MLA Michael Moore who said the community stood to loose up to $10 million from a misuse of the lease system.

“”If the club does not want land for golf, the purpose for which it was given a very cheap lease, then it should hand it back,” he said.

The general president of Yowani, Pat Griffin, said the club had selected a preferred developer. The development would be done with Yowani having a major say in design so it is integrated with the course.

Members would have first option on the dwellings.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_yowani”

ACT Electricity and Water called on Canberrans yesterday to voluntarily conserve water, saying that at present consumption rates compulsory restrictions would apply on Thursday.

Those restrictions would ban outside use of water on pain of a maximum $5000 fine for individuals or $25,000 for corporations.

They would be the first water restrictions in Canberra for more than 20 years.

The water shortage is being caused by bans by ACTEW engineers on the treating of water in protest at the ACT Government’s move to bring ACTEW under its Public Sector Management Bill.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_water”

ACT Government has moved to replace the board of the ACT TAB, according to racing and other sources.

A special Cabinet meeting has been called for this morning to appoint chartered accountant Bruce Glanville as chairman and two other members, solicitor Elizabeth Bradley and the head of the Department of Sport Mark Owens, who is a former secretary of the ACT Racing Club.

The reports could not be confirmed officially last night and none of the new board members could be contacted directly last night.

The fate of the chief executive, Phillip Neck, is in the hands of the new board. It is expected though that the board will recommend to the Minister for Sport, David Lamont, that he be replaced.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_vitab10”

The ACT Government is the most ideologically left-wing government in the western world, according to the Leader of the Opposition, Alexander Downer.

No matter which party was in power, the days of the Federal Government being the source of wealth and growth for the ACT were over, he said on a visit to the CT Legislative Assembly yesterday.

The ACT had to put out the welcoming mat to business if it was to prosper.

He said, however, that there would be no public service bashing by him and that he had a great deal of respect for public servants.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_downer”

Two independents and the Leader of the Opposition, Kate Carnell, issued yesterday a joint statement calling for the immediate release of the report by Professor Dennis Pearce into the Vitab affair.

“”We are concenred that you have permitted your staff or senior bureaucrats to selectively leak information to the media about Professor Pearce’s findings,” they said.

The inquiry was publicly funded and the people of Canberra are entitled to its early release.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_vitab07”

At the heart of the VITAB affair is a question. Was this proposal a genuine foray into the Asian betting market by ACTTAB after receiving a proposal from a company that had secured a betting licence in Vanuatu? Or was the VITAB proposal totally underwritten by a couple of Australian syndicates of big smart punters sick of having to beat the 15 per cent government take before it can make a profit? Why not go off-shore where the government take and overhead costs are lower and the returns higher?

Pearce shows ACTTAB was naive, too enthusiastic and starry-eyed at the presence of the Great Punter Bob Hawke. He shows, too, that the VITAB directors were smart in insisting on a confidentiality agreement which would cut off some of its and the department’s avenues of inquiry.

But why did they fall for it? Because they were bureaucratic babes in a commercial wood. Why did VITAB go for it? Because the prize was big: access to wealth generated by government monopoly and prohibition that would not otherwise be there.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_compearc”

After years of fighting in the courts and paying lawyers millions of dollars, Microsoft and Stac have agreed to kiss and make up.

The story so far: Stac Electronics clever programmers worked out a way to get a personal computer to shrink files to less than half their size for storage on the hard disk and explode them to normal on use. This included program files.

It meant that with this program people could store twice as much on their hard disk, thus postponing the expensive day of replacing the hard-disk with a bigger on.

Microsoft thought it was so good that it ought to have such a program on its next version of DOS to give users an extra reason to upgrade. For many people the program was the only reason to upgrade. A new version of DOS at $99 is cheaper than a new hard disk at $400.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_upgrad27”

The opposition to the ugly mobile-phone telecommunications towers continues. Now Queanbeyan Council is seeking legal advice about what can be done to make the telecommunications companies less gung-ho.

After Canberra protests about the towers, Planning Minister Bill Wood approached the Federal Government to see what could be done. It was generally thought that nothing could be done because Commonwealth telecommunications law broadly said that the companies could put their towers where they liked irrespective of territory or state planning law.

However, the ACT unlike anywhere else in Australia has some Commonwealth Planning law called the Australian Capital Territory Planning and Land Management Act. This sets up the National Capital Planning Authority which has drawn up a plan which has been approved by Parliament and has the force of law.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_comp20”

Banasonic has launched a gadget to display three-dimensional things on a video screen. It is good for displaying small items of medical apparatus, electronic gadgets, tools or any product at all to large audiences. It has the advantage over displaying photographic images of an item because you can move your product around during your presentation.

You can swing the unit’s cameras around to take images off the wall. ($6399 02 9867569).

The information super-highway is like the Holy Roman Empire, which was described as not being an empire, hardly at all Roman and certainly not holy.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_upgrad20”