Crispin Hull

This letter is a bit of an effrontery because I am going to offer you a solution to the Northern Ireland problem when I don’t have any experience in foreign affairs or diplomacy. However, when one looks at what the people with experience in foreign affairs and diplomacy have done, I don’t think it is a disqualification.

The first thing is you must stop announcing policy with words that mean different things to each side.

Talking about “”self-determination, freely and concurrently given, north and south” is plain silly. Ian Paisley and intractable mob of Protestant Unionists think this means that there will be no governmental changes in Northern Ireland without consent of a majority of the people in Northern Ireland. As there are more Protestants than Catholics he thinks he is safe. Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein (Ted Heath would call them the acceptable face of the IRA), on the other hand, think that “”self-determination” means a vote of the whole of Ireland, north and south, and thus there will be union.
Continue reading “1994_01_january_column10jan”

Are nearly all dead now, more’s the pity. Certainly, they have all long retired.

These are the people who made the self-serving, short-sighted, foolish and out-of-touch decisions in Cabinet 30 years ago. Under the 30-year rule, the ministerial Cabinet submissions of 1963 were made public on January 1, 1994.

We learn of a Minister outlining the electoral advantage for the Menzies Government if Aborigines were counted at census time as ultimately came about in the 1967 referendum. By counting them, the conservative states of Western Australia and Queensland might each get an extra seat. We learn that Cabinet rejected a ban on tobacco advertising despite the obvious evidence of tobacco’s dangers because Australian tobacco growers would lose. We learn of a pompous plan to put a 100-metre Westminster-style tower on the shore of Lake Burley Griffin. We see how the Menzies Government knew that Australia would be made a nuclear target by allowing the joint-US North-West Cape naval communications base to be built, but agreed anyway. And we see how none of the sycophantic Cabinet raised a word of protest before Menzies announced that the new unit of decimal currency would be called the Royal. Only when it was laughed out court, so to speak, in the pubs and cafes did anyone come back to Cabinet with something more in touch with popular sentiment.
Continue reading “1994_01_january_column03jan”

Was hardly enough room at the Bar table in No 1 courtroom at the High Court that day.

It was in 1982 or perhaps 1983. Every state, the Commonwealth and the plaintiff was represented by a QC and a junior, all in silk, stuff and horsehair. On the Bench six of the seven judges wore gowns and wigs. Justice Murphy, sensibly did not wear one. In all, there were nearly two dozen players in full theatrical costume, enough to put on a Shakespearean comedy _ Much Ado About Nothing would have been appropriate for what was about to unfold.

In measured tones, the tobacco company’s QC began his attack on what he called unconstitutional taxes on tobacco products by state governments.

At that stage state governments had been imposing taxes in various guises on alcohol for a quarter of a century and taxes on tobacco and petrol for some time.
Continue reading “1993_12_december_column7”

Are colonising more and more occupations. At first they dealt only with scientific data, then big-scale data, then words and then small accounts.

In 1979 the first visual display terminals came to The Canberra Times. Within a short time computers killed off one profession and colonised another. There are now virtually no typesetters and no typing pools. That occupation is killed off, and another occupation, the journalists who create the words, are colonised. Much the same thing has happened in accounting. Once there were those who repetitively keyed in figures and on the other hand those who manipulated and interpreted those figures. Now those two groups have been fused. Those who solely practised the repetitive task have been killed off (occupationally) and the rest have been colonised.

Lawyers firms, too, are being taken. Government departments have succumbed, though more slowly. And nearly all of academia has been colonised by the beige boxes. Many meetings have been replaced by electronic mail.
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It may prod people into being more active about territorial affairs.

The addition of party voting to the Robson-Hare-Clark system approved in last year’s referendum is a bit like adding an office block to a wilderness so people have a wider choice of scenery. Great office block. Pity about the wilderness.

However, it may be a blessing. Let me explain. The eight other Australian polities (six states, the Commonwealth and the Northern Territory) only have to deal with apathy. The ACT has to deal with not only apathy, but a more corrosive political snobbery. In the other polities a large mass of people are content to measure out their lives in soap operas and sport. But those polities at least have a stratum of professionals, socially active people, academics and the like who do care about government and get involved.

Not so in the ACT. From the earliest days of self-government the cream of Canberra professionally and intellectually took great pride in professing ignorance of and disdain for affairs of the local Assembly. They kept their eyes on national affairs.
Continue reading “1993_12_december_column20”

My last day of a three-month stint at the National Capital Planning Authority a pleasant young man from Personnel came to give me a summary of my final payout.

The young man said he was sorry the statement was so late, but it had taken a long time to work out, especially the tax. The tax calculation had taken one and a half pages.

I asked whether he had a program to do it for him.

“A bloke I know in Finance has got one on Excel, and I’m going to get it from him,” he replied.

This was pretty wry stuff, I thought. The tax laws are so distorted that it takes hours for a small organisation to work out what should be a simple pay-out after a three-month stint, unless, of course, one is blessed with a program produced by someone in the Department of Finance. What about the storekeeper in Gilgandra hiring a casual over the holidays?
Continue reading “1993_12_december_column27”

The boring old marketing presentation has come a long way.

Travelling sellers no longer need struggle inarticulately without graphic tools. Of course, they can still struggle inarticulately withgraphic tools, but computer graphics that explain things better have been around some time.

Colour slides, overheads and videos are an essential part of the sales presentation. Not only in sales. Executives of all sorts are coming to rely on graphics to cliche their message across.

Corporate-structure diagrams, sales targets, production schedules, performance indicators and quality-assurance plans are finding their way on to slides and overheads to explain to middle management, clients and customers why they are being downsized, outsized, growthed, negatively growthed or projected into a dynamic new phase.
Continue reading “1993_12_december_snapgraf”

What we are seeing in the Australian economy can be better explained by psychologists than economists.

The mass of foreign debt gets bigger. There have been two months of uncertainty over the Budget and several more over Mabo. The Government’s industrial-relations “”reforms” amount to next to nothing. The mass of jobless remains constant. (I refrain from calling it a jobless queue, because a queue presumes that one’s turn will come and a bus will arrive or fish and chips will be served.) And the dollar behaves like a broken yo-yo _ it only goes down. These things would normally add up to business gloom.

Yet the share market has been on a steady climb for nearly a year. At the end of 1992 it was at a post Gulf War nadir of 1400 points. It has now busted 2000 and keeps on climbing.

It must have more to do with the forces of greed and fear than the forces of supply and demand. Or more correctly, the irrational, erratic forces of greed and fear are driving supply and demand.
Continue reading “1993_11_november_column1”

HERE is a profound line, surprisingly, in the film Crocodile Dundee. Dundee is asked by the American girl, “”Who owns this land?” He points at a rock and says words to the effect, “”Who owns the rock, when you die or I die, the rock will still be there?”

Richard Court is like the American girl. To him the land has to be owned. People have to have title so they can buy and sell land as an economic item. It is a mindset prevalent in North America and in Western Australia. And it explains (in so far as it can be explained) Court’s latest proposal to overturn the effect of the Mabo judgment that recognised native title in Australia.

Court wants to extinguish native title and replace it with a statutory right to traditional usage of the land. He says that if the use of the land is taken away from Aboriginal people (say through a grant of a mining or pastoral lease or through a grant of freehold) compensation will be paid. Existing titles (other than native title, of course) would be validated. He says the High Court never gave indigenous people freehold title so what he is doing is consistent with the High Court judgment. Like the High Court’s native-title ruling his new statutory right would give indigenous people the right to use the land in their traditional ways.
Continue reading “1993_11_november_column8”

Smirk on my face at the news that Derryn Hinch was to be removed from Channel 10 quickly turned to a frown.

I naively thought that Hinch was being fired for being appalling. Alas, we find he was fired because he was not appalling enough. His replacement is to be Alan Jones, a man denounced as a plagiarist in 1990 and denounced for making racist comments on radio. Hinch may have been a sanctimonious prig, but at least he was an honest sanctimonious prig.

Channel Ten is to take the time slot from the sidewalk into the debris trap of the stormwater drain. Will the other two commercial channels resist the temptation to join it?

The phenomenon of the competing television market is the nearest thing Australia has to the English tabloid market _ the sort of market that resulted in last week’s keyhole journalism by the Mirror group which published pictures taken by a hidden camera of Princess Diana in a gymnasium.
Continue reading “1993_11_november_column15”