Crispin Hull

AFTER spending a week on a tropical island in the Torres Strait, you see some very primitive cultural habits. Some of them are really dumb and very costly.

It’s no good saying you have to respect culture no matter what. These things have to be questioned.

I’m not talking about the cultural habits I saw on the island, of course. No; I refer to the ones I saw among white fellas with a fresh eye on my return.
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IT WAS an unusual conveyance. Usually conveyances of land are done in land-titles offices by lawyers and their clerks dressed in business clothes. Usually conveyances require long-winded documents expressed in legalese in an attempt to prevent subsequent disputes. The land is described with great precision. The rights of those involved are defined clearly. Not on Friday. I witnessed what could loosely be described as a conveyance on Murray Island in the Torres Strait.

Murray Island, you will recall, was the island that was subject to the now-famous Mabo case in the High Court. Their Honours would be pleased to know that Mabo Case T-shirts are regularly worn by Islanders. The Islanders would prefer the case to be known, however, as the Murray Island case, or the Mer case, Mer being the traditional name. Eddie Mabo, you see, lived much of his life on the mainland. He was, however, a political stirrer and propelled the case.

Only 400 of perhaps 3000 Murray Islander people inhabit the island. Many of the others come back from time to time, some to live, especially after their children have grown up and been educated in Cairns or Townsville. And Thus it was that a Murray Islander with the improbably name of called Elsie Smith came back to Murray Island earlier this year with her son, Carl, to ask for possession of her family lands on the island.
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THE centenary celebrations of the Corowa constitutional convention recently a couple of speakers bemoaned that Australia did not get a Bill of Rights in its early nationhood, like the US.

They rejected, of course, the one aberration of the US Bill of Rights the right to bear arms. Its other elements are: freedom of speech, assembly, religion, trial by jury, no deprivation of liberty or property without due process of law and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.

The Australian Founding Fathers smugly thought that there was no need to state the obvious in our Constitution. The common law respected all those things and it was unimaginable that the legislature would take them away. Ho-hum. By and large, the basic common-law freedoms have been upheld in Australia, especially compared with other countries, but there is always room for improvement. The important one is freedom of speech.
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Ron Bell acknowledges that good design results in easier sales, better value for buyers, and therefore more profit.

His company is developing the Belconnen Golf Club project. Like renewals and in-fill generally it has come in for flak over whether the ACT Government should be charging more betterment tax, but it has not drawn the community and neighbourhood fury that other developments have over design _ to the contrary.

The site is in the centre of the golf course and has approval for 340 blocks, though Bell has knocked that back to 318. He would prefer 318 blocks with good streetscape and vista than jamming on 340.
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A Canberra auctioneering company has debts of at least $1.1 million, mainly to the Federal and ACT Governments, according to the liquidator, Ray Dawson, of Ernst Young.

Mr Dawson was appointed official liquidator by the Federal Court last Friday. The company, Sale-O Pty Ltd, traded as Australian Capital Auctioneers, and had a large trade in selling government goods, especially cars, furniture and computer equipment.

Mr Dawson said a “”best estimate” presented to the court showed the company had assets of $40,000 and debts of $1.1 million after 2{ (two and a half) years trading.
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He came around the front of his desk for the interview, rather than talk across it. He has a fair amount of space at his offices in Mugga Way. He is the chief executive and national director (practice) of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects. However, he is more interested in what you do with space than how much of it you have.

Australia, of course, has a lot of space. But as most of the population is packed into the south-east corner it is becoming more precious. The pressure is on for higher density living.

Peck sees a danger in this.
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It might sound like astral travelling, but when the members of the Republic Advisory Committee flew across the ACT border yesterday they entered a body politic under the Crown.

We know this because it says so in Section 7 of the Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act. For all intents and purposes that Act is the Constitution of the ACT. It is as important in the running of ACT affairs as the Federal Constitution is for the running of Federal matters.

The ACT’s Constitution could provide a very useful model for the committee as it looks for options for an Australian republic. The reason is that the ACT Constitution avoids nearly all of the ephemeral and uncertain elements that imbue the Federal Constitution.
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A dispute between the ACT Executive and an Assembly committee could delay the creation of a separate ACT Public Service.

At present ACT public servants are in the Federal service. Last year the Federal Government made it clear it wanted the ACT to create its own service and agree to help pay for the transition.

The Assembly set up a committee in June to inquire into the change. In June it asked for a private briefing from senior ACT bureaucrats. Yesterday the Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett, wrote to the committee’s chair, Tony de Domenico, refusing the briefing until after the Government put its submission to the committee on August 13.
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The Member for Canberra, John Langmore, has made a couple of pertinent points about betterment tax in this paper and on ABC radio in the past week.

The debate flared again a couple of weeks ago when I had the impertinence to suggest that the ACT Government would not get much sympathy in its attempt to balance the Budget while it continued to give developers a 50 per cent rebate on betterment tax.

The debate began in 1913, so my contribution was hardly new or original. In 1913, at the founding of the capital, it was decided to have a leasehold system to prevent land speculation. Ever since, administrators, politicians, developers and speculators have done their damnest to pervert leasehold either so they could line their own pockets with the increases in value that come from changes to more profitable uses of land or out of the honest but misguided view that land developers need economic encouragement.
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A wire security fence surrounds a patch of the carpark of old Royal Canberra Hospital on Acton Peninsula. A yellow sign says: Site for Hospice.

The peninsula is like a scene from The Day of the Triffids. It is a weekday afternoon. There should be people, noise and traffic so close to the city centre. Instead there is an eerie quiet. Large empty buildings are still intact with signs to direct people and cars. It is as if the people had fled some impending terror.

From the point of the peninsula you feel you can touch Commonwealth Avenue Bridge. The busy late afternoon traffic scurries home from the office to the television news. Parliament House is just there. It is the centre of Canberra, but someone has cast a taboo across it. It is a sacred site.
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