Crispin Hull

Canberra has played its role as a national communication centre haphazardly, to the delight and amazement of our international competitors, according to a senior communications academic.

Dr Graeme Osborne, of the University of Canberra’s Faculty of Communication, said communication was more than transmission of information.

“”Australian society, Canberra included, has largely failed to understand or even systematically assess the role of communication in its national life,” he said. “”At the international level we still see the spectacle that amazes and delights out international competitors, that is of Australian states and companies bidding unnecessarily against each other for overseas contracts.”
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Ten top ACT bureaucrats met at Commonwealth Club yesterday to hear a top private-sector financial guru tell them how to get better results with public money.

The meeting came the day after the Federal Auditor-General said that the Commonwealth Government was getting worse financial advice than the average company.

Bart Vogel, from Deloitte, Touche and Tohmatsu accountants and management consultants told the ACT bureaucrats that “”salami slicing” was a silly way to control costs.
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The ACT Government is on the verge of a decision to give it some extra land around the margin of Lees Paddock on the northern side of the Scrivener Dam road and along its Dunrossil Drive boundary so it can put in 18 more holes, subject to membership approval.

There would be a crossing across Dunrossil Drive (the road to Government House) to link the present 18 holes with the new ones.

The club has wanted to expand for more than a decade. It got a lease on Lees Paddock in 1984. There was a delay while the club negotiated with a potential developer for the adjacent Old Canberra Brickworks. There was a plan for a shared 18-hole course with the hotel development, but plan failed when the developer could not raise the money.
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The Commonwealth Government is to limit its employment growth in Civic and give priority to developing more office space in Gungahlin, Tuggeranong and Belconnen.

It made the announcement in a response to recommendations on transport links between Gungahlin and the rest of Canberra by the Federal Joint Parliamentary Committee on the National Capital, chaired by John Langmore.

The Government has also supported: A study of a rapid-transport system for the ACT, which is under way by the National Capital Planning Authority and the ACT Planning Authority.
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The Federal Government should retreat to the Parliamentary Triangle, leaving the rest of Canberra to develop like any other Australian city, a former chairman of the Grants Commission, Justice Rae Else-Mitchell, said yesterday.

He said there was little more to do on the national scale in Canberra, so the Federal Government should look after the Triangle and a few major national institutions outside it and let the rest of Canberra be just like a state.

From 1957, when the National Capital Development Commission began, to the time of Fraser Government, “”vast amounts of public money were spent in the ACT.” The money spent on national institutions was by-and-large “”a proper manifestation of national aspirations”, however, the money spent on non-national services to the populations was “”extravagant and beyond the standards of similar projects and services provided to the rest of Australia’s citizens living in the cities, towns and rural areas of the states”.
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The ACT electoral authorities should work out the theme for the naming of the three ACT electorates and then call for public comment, Independent MLA Helen Szuty said yesterday.

The ACT redistribution committee is meeting this week to draw up provisional boundaries and give provisional names for the electorates.

Very few submissions have been received about the names.

Ms Szuty said to date they fell into three groups: geographic, Aboriginal and names of people who had made a contribution to Canberra.
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Residents in the Tuggeranong suburb of Conder were celebrating what they see as a partial planning victory yesterday.

The Department of Environment Land and Planning has listened to some of their objections over medium-density re-zoning of a site in their street, Darebin Place.

Residents’ spokesman Neville Shelley said the department had agreed to set a maximum of 10 private dwellings on the site, previously it had been open-ended. The department had also set conditions that would result in the protection of several mature eucalyt trees on the site.
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The issues paper has firmly recognised the complexity of the republican question. It is not a question of crossing out “”Queen and Governor-General” and inserting “”President” _ the “”minimalist approach”. Once the Head of State is elected and removable by some other instrument than the Prime Minister (by advising _ read telling _ the Queen) the President has an independent fountain of power.

And that means if you leave the rest of the Constitution as is, you give the President very wide powers: to appoint and dismiss ministers including the Prime Minister and the power to dissolve Parliament and call and election. In other words, the so-called “”minimalist” approach becomes a “”maximist” approach.
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Sometime in the 1940s Justice Owen Dixon and Justice George Rich were overheard leaving a concert in Sydney given by an ABC orchestra.

Dixon was Australia’s most pre-eminent judge, noted for his fine powers of reason.

The conversation went something like this:

Rich: Splendid concert, wasn’t it?

Dixon (deep in thought): Oh yes, quite. But I still don’t see what it has got to do with postal, telegraphic, telephonic and other like services.
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THE natural lawyers and legal positivists have come the full circle. Last week the UN Security Council resolved to set up a permanent war-crimes court. The Security Council, of course, comprises those countries on the winning side in World War II. Between them, they set up the first war-crimes trials at Nuremburg after that war. They resparked a great debate among legal philosophers. On one side were the natural lawyers and on the other were the legal positivists.

Natural law goes back to ancient times and has taken many forms. Broadly, it appeals to some higher form of universal morality beyond church and nation. Legal positivism, a creature of the scientific age scoffed at this, arguing that the only law was the law factually promulgated and enforced by the state. The positivists argued that natural law was a lot of unprovable wool not worthy of consideration by the fine minds of the law schools of the world.
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