Crispin Hull

USUALLY you get Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Or Beethoven’s Fur Elise. But not when you phone the Australians for Constitutional Monarchy.

There, the on-hold tune is Greensleeves, widely reputed, but perhaps wrongly, to have been composed by Henry VIII. Now there’s a man who knew something about constitutional change Henry VIII.

But he is also a prime illustration of a point the constitutional monarchists are trying to make: the republican-monarchy debate is not about the personalities of the Royal family, but about the what they call the integrity of the Australian Constitution, the apex of which is the Australian Crown.
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A YEAR is not long, even in the short 92-year history of the Australian nation, but it is perhaps enough to say that Mabo must rank with the 1920 Engineers Case the two most important High Court cases since the court’s founding.

These two cases stand out because they changed fundamentals. Before the Engineers Case, Australia was a collection of six almost independent states with very broad powers bound together only by the need to have a common defence force and a common market allowing the free flow of goods and people between the states. The national Parliament exercised a few incidental powers over currency and lighthouses, and not much else.Any attempt by the Parliament to enact laws for the general welfare of Australians was struck down as interfering with states’ rights.
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THE Governor-General, Bill Hayden, in a speech to a national conference on violence, pointed to the dilemma. He said his liberal conscience was troubled by television and other media violence. The anti-censorship view of liberals two or three decades ago is now under severe challenge. Then it was easy to scoff at the idiocy of censors who wanted to ban Lady Chatterley’s Lover or The Little Red Schoolbook. Then it was a simple battle between art and censors, or harmless idiocy and the censors. The censors did not seem to have much of a case. It was a question of adults being entitled to read, listen to and watch what they want.

Some believe that society is now bearing the fruit of that liberalisation, that violence and demeaning of women is a direct result of the ready availability of material that expresses explicit violence and sexual exploitation. That material now comes in a greater variety of forms. It is not only written material. It now includes videos material and high-resolution sound on CDs. The correlation between the availability of this material and violence in society is not yet proven. It is obviously a subject worthy of much more research and debate.
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IT MUST be a profound nuisance for planners, administrators and developers to have all those NIMBYs, conservationists and do-gooders out there trying to wreck the best laid plans of mice and men.

When will they learn what is good for them?

This week the Todd report came down. Robert Todd, a former member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, conducted an inquiry into a redevelopment project in Braddon. He found some major faults with the planning process and made some fairly pertinent observations.
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An anomaly in the land-tax legislation will result in people being hit for a whole year’s land tax even if they hold a rental property for a few days in the new financial year.

The president of the Landlords’ Association, Peter Jansen, said yesterday that he knew of a case of a woman who had sold her property, but as settlement was scheduled for July 3, she would be hit for the whole year’s tax of $1000.

The legislation assessed tax for the whole year on the basis of ownership on July 1. Mr Jansen called for quarterly assessment.
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PAUL KEATING was being dismissive. “”I think a lot of this stuff just slips into … history,” he said. He was being interviewed on Four Corners about the coming series Labor In Power, a five-part documentary over the near-decade-long leadership contest between him and Bob Hawke.

His dismissive comment could not have been a higher compliment. History is what it’s all about. And the story of political history is the story of power.

The writer-creator of Labor in Power, Philip Chubb, said this week, “”I wanted to prise the lid off how power works, who exercised power, how they exercised it and why.”
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GET me a copy of that letter we sent to Jones about the car insurance. Now A fairly typical demand in any office.

“”Some months ago I wrote an article about buses using ethanol. Can you dig it out for me? I need it yesterday.” A fairly typical inquiry of a newspaper library.

Now scurrying through paper files is at and end. Instead, full-text electronic searching is here with a program called ISYS. Another document-finding program, Sherlock, has also come on to the market. Sherlock is not very good, but it is cheap. ISYS is stunning. So is its price.
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City Hill is one of the points of the Parliamentary Triangle _ an intersection of Canberra the national city and Canberra the municipal city.

It is now also the centre of a bureaucratic and political triangle _ or more correctly quadrangle.

The sides of the quadrangle contain the ACT Government, the National Capital Planning Authority, the parliamentary Joint Committee on the National Capital and the Federal Minister responsible for Canberra, Brian Howe, also affectionately known as the Minister for Better Cities.
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The Governor-General, Bill Hayden, dabbled in some more sociology yesterday, this time with a little help from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Mr Hayden set out to lay to rest yesterday the myth that Canberra workers had high levels of earnings.

He did this in three ways. He compared Canberra to other capital cities (as distinct from whole states or territories). He standardised the Canberra figures making allowances for Canberra’s higher education. And he compared Canberra with other similar-sized urban statistical areas in Sydney, and found they were better off.
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A residents’ group has come into conflict with Canberra’s “sporting heartland” over controlling traffic from Belconnen to the city.

After the publication of the Territory Plan earlier this month, the North Canberra Protection Group said yesterday that Ginninderra Drive should be extended from its T-junction with Mouat Street to Northbourne Avenue rather than widening Mouat Street to take the Belconnen traffic.

The group said the $4 million proposal under the Territory Plan to widen Mouat Street would adversely affect residents with noise and would not provide as good a traffic flow as extending Ginninderra Drive to Northbourne Avenue.
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