Crispin Hull

The ACT Liberal Party called on the ACT Government to break its promise on putting a hospice on Acton peninsula.

The leader of the party, Kate Carnell, said the hospice would become a white elephant unless Government diverted millions of dollars from other urgent health priorities into the complex.

Work on the 17-bed hospice is due to begin next month.
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The application of the Mabo was much less certain on the mainland than on Torres Strait islands, the Leader of the Opposition, John Hewson, said yesterday.

He was speaking on Murray Island, the subject of the Mabo decision, after discussions with the Community Council and the Council of Elders.

He implied that unlike in the islands, the necessary proof of continuous association with the land to establish native title would be very difficult on the mainland, but he did not want to prejudge it.
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Its Trigger speaking. Trigger, more formally Jimmy Daddie Tapau, is a 60-year-old Torres Strait Islander. He has been fishing off Murray Island for most of his life. He knows every reef and every channel. Where and when to find crayfish, giant clams and fish in these abundant waters.

Murray Islanders got formal legal recognition of their ownership of the land in the High Court judgment in the Mabo case, but without security over the sea, from whence comes their traditional livelihood, the land rights will not be complete.

When the Leader of the Opposition, Dr John Hewson, arrives on the island tomorrow, he will be told this by the chairman of the Murray Island Community Council, Ron Day.

The Mabo case has sent waves of expectation over Aboriginal and Islander communities around Australia. It has caused obvious concern among mining and pastoral interests and tourist operators who want to continue to have access to national parks.

On Murray Island, or Mer as the indigenous people prefer to call it, however, the issue has moved from the land to the sea.

The Mabo case declared and secured what they saw was their land anyway. The sea is another vital question. The islanders are concerned that large commercial fleets will take their sea produce.

The other linked issue is economic development.

“”The professionalism and self-esteem of islanders has been destroyed by the dole cheque,” Day said. “”People here are born fishermen. We have to re-create that professionalism and responsibility. Those responsible for destroying it had a responsibility to help re-create it.”
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The president of the council of elders of Murray Island, Doug Bon, expressed disquiet yesterday about the visit to the island next week by the Leader of the Opposition, John Hewson.

Murray Island, about 150km north-east of Cape York, was declared by the High Court in the Mabo case last year to be owned by the indigenous people.

Mr Bon said yesterday that when elders had first heard on Wednesday about an approach by Senator Ian McDonald (check) on behalf of Dr Hewson, had been against his visit.
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His helicopter landed on the beach. He brought two other white men with him. Another two aircraft landed at the strip a kilometre away, bringing more white men and some white women with large television cameras, still cameras and notebooks.

They rode along a pot-holed, dusty track and walked inside on the of few brick buildings on the island _ a low building painted inside and out in Third World colours: yellow, turquoise, bright blue and red, but dirty.

The colour choice is to brighten economically deprived lives. You see them in many Pacific islands, El Salavador and any number of African countries. But this is Australia. It is Murray island, head of the Great Barrier Reef and subject of the Mabo decision.
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Bob Hawke may have 2020 vision, but he does not have 2020 hindsight. It is extraordinary that we listen to former politicians, especially ones that got the top job (I hesitate to call them leaders), who upon retirement suddenly find the vision that they lacked in office.

Anyone with the vaguest political memory would have blushed with embarrassment at Hawke’s inaugural speech to the 2020 Vision forum on Monday.

He called for a return to full employment. Yet this was the Prime Minister who allowed his Treasurer to put the fight against inflation ahead of full employment and who presided over the highest level of unemployment since World War II.
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Canberrans would have to lower their expectations of government services, the chairman of the Commonwealth Grants Commission, Dick Rye, said yesterday.

Mr Rye also warned the ACT Government against using borrowings for current spending.

His warning comes as the ACT Cabinet prepares its 1993-94 Budget facing an extra financing requirement of $110 million unless its changes policies or borrows.
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The Minister for Environment, Land and Planning is happy to attend a public meeting about development in North Duffy-Holder, he said yesterday.

He was responding to a North-Duffy-Holder Residents Action Group letter which said no-one from the ACT Government had attended several public meetings on the issue in the past, unlike Liberal, Independent and Abolish Self-Government representatives.
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I imagined a typical public meeting on matters of legal reform. Twenty or so earnest, well-informed people with a commitment to community matters would be dwarfed by a large lecture theatre hired by the impossibly optimistic organisers.

And thus I prepared a brief talk on Crown reserve powers in the ACT and how they might apply nationally _ fairly esoteric but suitably informative stuff for my imagined audience.

Little did I know. The Nicholls Theatre at the National Convention Centre was packed to overflowing.
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NOT MUCH can be usefully added to the abortion debate. The stir over the funding of a clinic in Canberra is a case in point. Several times in the past 20 years an abortion clinic has been proposed. Each time the letter writers and commentators on each side round up the usual arguments.

Politicians generally hate the abortion debate. Politically, it is like the gun issue. People are prepared to change their vote on that issue alone. Take away my gun and you lose my vote. Legalise/prohibit abortion you lose my vote.

Last week, Professor Geoffrey Walker, of Queensland University, suggested a way to take such issues “”out of the hands of extremists”. He repeated his call for citizens’ veto and citizens’ initiative.
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