Crispin Hull

It is to be business as usual for one of Canberra’s leading building and land-development companies, Consolidated Builders Ltd, after the election of a new five-person board of directors, which included two from the old board.

The company’s solicitor, Bernard Collaery, said yesterday that shareholders had agreed on Thursday night to have a five-member board of directors, rather than four, as recommended by a committee of inquiry into the company.

The committee had criticised three of four former directors for administrative irregularities and for buying land for themselves in Queensland near land they had bought on behalf of the company.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_build3”

The Deputy Chief Minister and Minister for Sport, David Lamont, said yesterday that it would have been remiss of him as a minister not to have dismissed the ACT TAB board last Friday.

The Canberra Times has copies of letters between him and the board’s chair, Athol Williams, showing Mr Lamont refused to give the board collectively or its legal advisers copies of the Pearce report into the Vitab affair upon which the dismissals were based.

Mr Lamont said that after receiving the report he had got advice from the Chief Government Solicitor. If he had not acted he would have left himself open to the allegation that he had not acted responsibly.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_tabsack”

At one stage it nearly hit $60 million, but has been steadily reduced since self-government. Last year it was $44.7 million and this year it will be $39.8 million.

However, $250,000 of that can be put down to the deferral of the bus replacement program. That deferral will save $10.6 million on the capital account.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_budtran”

An the ACT TAB become the mouse that roared. With the end of the arrangement with pooling arrangement with Victoria looming, the ACT appears it will have to grovel to NSW to get a pooling arrangement. But the ACT is not without some ammunition, albeit highly risky stuff.

Without a pooling arrangement ACTTAB, according to Professor Dennis Pearce’s report, will not be viable under present circumstances.

First to background.

TABs in Australia turn over nearly $9 billion a year (a little under the defence budget). State Governments take about $900 million or 10 per cent, handing some of that to the racing industry. About $450 million (5 per cent) goes in overheads. The remaining 85 per cent goes back to punters. The betting pool on each race is divided this way and the return to punters is calculated (italic) after (end italic) each race is run (unlike bookies).
Continue reading “1994_06_june_taboped”

If you do not have the money for pet projects you have to beg, borrow or steal it. The ACT is trying to do all three. It has successfully begged from the Federal Government and it is going to borrow, which is tantamount to stealing from future generations.

Begging is a fairly public event, but the stealing from future generations has to be covered up or at least disguised. And that is precisely what has happened.

This year’s and last year’s Budget papers are quite open on the begging issue and reveal how successful the ACT Government has been at it. Last year it predicted Commonwealth payments to the ACT would be $533. As it happened the Commonwealth came up with an extra $41 million. Perhaps the ACT does matter after all, especially in the context of Federal Labor having six our of eight second-tier governments held by their conservative opponents and an election in February for Federal Labor’s most friendly face around the COAG table.

(Incidentally, I have been trying to come up with a shorthand for state and territory governments without ignoring the territories. Better suggestions than second-tier will be gratefully received and fed into the Australian language through these columns.)
Continue reading “1994_06_june_budforum”

The decisive and secretive wholesale dismissal of the board and chief executive of the ACT TAB in the past two days does not sit well with the high ideals of the Government’s own Public Sector Management Bill.

One of those ideals was that all ACT public-sector employees would come under the Bill. The TAB had only been left out initially because of the Vitab inquiry. Another was that public sector employees would have certain protections, including due process before dismissal.

The chief executive of the TAB, Philip Neck, under the Government’s centralised new public-sector structure would have been the equivalent of a head of department. And under that structure the Government would not have been able to send him on his bike without a least a chance to put his case.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_tabcomm”

The United Nations should set up a formal Office of Creativity, according to the creator of the term “”lateral thinking”, Edward de Bono.

Dr de Bono said in an interview from London that the special UN office was needed “”to think about the problems which the UN hasn’t got the faintest idea how to deal with. Somalia, Bosnia and so on.”

His new book, Parallel Thinking, will be published tomorrow. In it he says, “”Western thinking is failing because its complacent arrogance prevents it from seeing the extent of its failure”.

He argues that many of the social and political problems of the world are approached on the basis that if you remove the cause the problem will be solved. This might work 60 per cent of the time, but in the other 40 the cause might not be able to be found, or it might be immovable (because it is human nature), he said. So different thinking was required to move forward.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_bononews”

ACT sales manager of electronic products with a laptop that can replace the reams of paper series that are put out by the Bureau of Statistics……

It is a thin slice of the whole of Australia taken on census day in 1991 and put on to a CD. This information is very valuable stuff _ because it is packaged the right way.

The blank CD is worth about $2. Stacked with the census information and more importantly some powerful extractive software it retails for $10,500 from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. (It includes training.)

A whole lot of information is useless. A whole lot of information organised, tabulated and indexed on paper is worth a lot more. But information on CD with correlation software is worth a lot more.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_stats”

Is Socratic thought hitting the limit in the physical sciences as well as in law, philosophy and politics.

The Socratic method of classifying and discovering what is by endless questioning and attacking of propositions has come unstuck in biology and physics.

In biology, the great classifiers of palaeontology early this century put the fossils of the Canadian Burgess Shale into the standard slots of evolutionary thought. Organisms, slowly and steadily adapting to the environment around them and through gradual mutation and survival of the fittest, varied and diversified gradually over the millions of years since life began on earth. Didn’t they?

A rethinking of the Burgess fossils in the 1970s changed that. The fossils were exactly the same. The thinking was different.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_bonobk”

Action by the Office of the Commissioner for ACT Revenue is driving car dealers out of business and threatening their employees’ jobs, according to the dealers.

They say they are being assessed for stamp duty which they have not collected from customers in cases of: interstate sales, sales to wreckers, sales to diplomats and on sales that later fell through.

One dealer has been hit with a bill of $93,000 and several notices threatening winding up. His assessment was for $40,000 in duty that he had not collected from customers and penalties in some cases of 140 per cent.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_stamps”