Crispin Hull

In Australia the printed word has been fairly free. Governments have made isolated attempts at suppression on the ground of “”national security”, especially when they face embarrassment but without much success. Even the restrictive defamation laws do not absolutely prohibit publication; they just make it very costly.

The reason for this relative freedom is largely constitutional. The Commonwealth has no specific power over newspaper publication, and attempts by the states to control major interstate ones have not been made for fear of falling foul of Section 92 which guarantees freedom of interstate trade.

This could soon change.
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Blewett said this week he hoped to head a parliamentary committee into improving the processes of Parliament. He hopes to give MPs a greater say in the legislative process.

It sounds like a novel idea: that MPs should legislate, but in case anyone has forgotten, that is what Parliament is for.

Dr Blewett, of course, is too late. It is almost an axiom of history that as soon as an institution moves into a perfectly designed building, like our multi-million dollar Parliament House, the institution has lost its power and function. There are plenty of examples. The British monarch moved into the new Buckingham Palace in about 1840 just as the monarchy lost its force as a politically powerful institution.
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Never was there a better example to illustrate the chasm between economic theory and the intricacies of taxation law than the humble birthday cake. There they were, the Leader of the Opposition one day and the Prime Minister the next, attempting to proselytise the glories of their economic policies but each coming unstuck as soon as they were questioned on the detail.

Confusion and complexity is not restricted to the GST; it is in the very nature of taxation law. Mr Keating had as much difficulty explaining the present sales tax as Dr Hewson did in explaining his GST. The economic policy is not especially difficult. Dr Hewson wants to shift the burden of taxation from production and exports (wholesale tax) and income (income tax and payroll tax) and put in on consumption.

This does not mean that the burden moves to different üpeople.@ Broadly the same people will pay the bulk of the tax. The difference is that they will pay tax on a different class of economic activity: consumption not production. This, he hopes, will change people’s conduct; they will do more producing and less consuming. And as there is no tax on production for export, they will do more exporting.
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Susan Oliver, the managing director of the Commission for the Future is to give the second address in the “”Canberra: Face the Nation?” series, the Canberra Business Council announced yesterday.

Her address will be held in the Senate Chamber of Old Parliament House on April 28 from 6 to 7.30pm.

The series began on Tuesday with an address by the chairman of Federal Capital Press of Australia Pty Ltd, publisher of The Canberra Times, Kerry Stokes.

The series is sponsored by the Canberra Business Council, the National Capital Planning Authority, the ACT Government and the University of Canberra. Six lead-up addresses will be given in Canberra by leading Australians with strong Canberra connections and three other addresses will be given in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane before a conference in September at the university which will be addressed by the Prime Minister, Paul Keating; the Leader of the Opposition, John Hewson; and the chair of the board of the Constitutional Centenary Foundation, Sir Ninian Stephen, among others.
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The section includes the eastern side of Torrens Street.

Mr Moore wrote to the Minister for Land, Environment and Planning, Bill Wood, calling for the inquiry which would be a first under the new Land (Environment and Planning) Act.

Mr Moore said there was a push by developers to buy single-residence blocks around the current redevelopment proposal.

Several sources have said that potential developers are door-knocking residents of detached houses in Section 22 Braddon, which is close to Civic, and elsewhere asking whether they want to sell.
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The ACT Government has put a stop to joint private-ACT Housing Trust development in the inner city following concerns over land speculation.

The Minister for Urban Services, Terry Connolly, said he was sending a signal to people buying houses next to trust properties in the hope of getting a profitable redevelopment deal.

Specualtion would not work, he said. There would be no more joint private-trust deals until after the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Committee of the Legislative Assembly had come up with some publicly available guidelines.

His move came after a call by Independent MLA Michael Moore for an inquiry into development in Section 22, Braddon. Mr Moore’s call came after suggestions that developers were asking residents to sell, and suggesting that medium-density development would surround them if they did not.
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Understanding the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a simple matter compared to the electoral process that faces the ACT in the next year.

Electoral authorities will be doing Trinity squared as they divide the ACT into three electorates. Not once, but twice. Once for the three ACT seats and once again for the three federal seats.

But the boundaries will have to be different. And they will be drawn up by two different sets of officials using some similar criteria and other dissimilar criteria. Many people will find themselves voting in the same electorate in both federal and local elections, but a good many will be in one electorate federally and a different one locally.

How did this extraordinary bureaucratic duplication come about?
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Tn April, 1988, he was accused by police of being the linchpin in a major car-stealing racket. At the time he was fixing up and re-spraying his two cars and one owned by his de-facto wife. He has been fixing and reconstructing cars for 30 years. At the time Mr Bond gave police details of where all the parts came from. The cars were seized by police to use in evidence. The cars were held outdoors in the Fyshwick yard. And there they stayed for nearly three years during the drawn out court process .

Mr Bond was convicted in the magistrates court and sentenced to three years’ jail on various charges. No-one else in the “”major car-stealing ring” was charged.

Mr Bond appealed to the Supreme Court. In the process of that appeal he had to take some paint samples from one of the cars. Police made him sign a document saying he would make good any damage when the cars were claimed by their “”true owners”.
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The death of a candidate before polling means the election wholly fails, according to the Electoral Act.

It means no voting for the seat will take place on March 13. However, people in the seat still have to go to the polls to elect senators.

The election for the House of Representatives seat works much like a by-election, except the Prime Minister does not get a say in the timing. The Electoral Act provides that “”a new writ shall forthwith be issued” for a supplementary election.
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The ACT is now entitled to a third federal seat _ unofficially.

Officially, the Australian Electoral Commission will do its redistribution in the 10th month after the next sitting of Parliament, as required by the Electoral Act.

However, unofficially, the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that the ACT’s population of 297,700 is 570 more than enough to give the ACT the third seat.

Under electoral law, the total population of the six states ÿ(subs correct: the six states only, not the total population) is divided by 144 (twice the number of state senators) to form a quota. The quota is divided into the population of each state and territory. Any remainder over half a quota results in an extra seat. The ACT is in this position now.

It is unlikely that the ACT will fall behind the quota in the time until the official redistribution because it has a higher population growth than the rest of Australia.

The extra seat means the size of the House of Representatives is likely to increase to 148 next election, depending on state quotas.

At the last election the two ACT seats, Fraser and Canberra, were the two most populous in the country with 96,185 and 94,273 voters respectively. With three seats, the ACT’s seats, with about 63,500 each, will be the least populous in Australia for some time _ smaller than those in Tasmania which is guaranteed five seats under the Constitution no matter what its population.

Several people from both sides of politics have had their eye on the third seat for some time. These will probably now come out in earnest.< pc The great ACT divisions