Crispin Hull

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.
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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.
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On Thursday evening I did a phone interview from London with Edward de Bono after reading his new book, Parallel Thinking.

I am now fairly sure that we have to be wary of gurus.

They can come in with some new method of thinking, some panacea, some way of changing previous thought patterns and society can get into all sorts of strife. They can be dogmatic and destructive.

The trouble is their ideas can be addictive, especially to the young and gullible and thing can catch on. Before you know where you are you have thousands of adherents, indeed whole nations and political systems based on the new method of thinking.
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The new third ACT Federal electorate is to be called Namadgi, the ACT redistribution committee proposed yesterday.

The seat will take in the whole of Tuggeranong, the Woden suburbs of Chifley, Farrer, Isaacs, Mawson, Pearce and Torrens and rural ACT to the south.

Canberra became entitled to a third seat shortly after the last election. It went into the election with the two largest federal seats, Canberra and Fraser. Fraser remains the northern seat. Canberra is now the central seat.

Fraser embraces the whole of Belconnen, Gungahlin, Hall and Jervis Bay.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_seats”

After several years of promises (from both sides) and trials, the Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett, committed the Government to introducing Budget has agreed to introduce weekly garbage collections with 160 litre wheeled plastic garbage bins and a further fortnightly collection of recyclables in a 180-litre bin.

Trial began in Kaleen more than a year ago and then in two more suburbs.

Under the new system residents will be able to put clean paper and cardboard, glass and PET plastic into the recycling bin and their other garbage in the weekly collection.

Contracts for the bins are in the process of being let.
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Either the ACT Government is badly advised, or it does not have any imagination or it is behaving artfully artful. Or perhaps all three.

The Deputy Chief Minister, David Lamont, said he had to dismiss the ACT TAB board immediately because of what was in the Pearce report into Vitab.

He got legal advice saying he could do this.

An exchange of letters received by The Canberra Times, however, reveals that he did not let the board members could not take away a copy of the report to discuss with their lawyers.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_sackcomm”

Corporate Australia is expanding too quickly. There are now 800,000 companies in Australia and the Australian Securities Commission has to keep tabs on all of them.

Its computer, an IBM MVS-based mainframe housed in the Attorney-General’s Department’s Belconnen computer section, is expected to run out of capacity in June, 1995. The ASC had projected this more than a year ago and continued its lease on the equipment till then. It thought it would be a good opportunity to move to open systems.

With open systems you do not pay a huge software fee for the operating system, but you do pay more for the dozens of different applications that are used on the terminals that hang off it. Hardware maintenance costs are also far cheaper because it is an open system and anyone’s hardware can hang off it, so you get the benefit of competition.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_asc”