Crispin Hull

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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If Professor C. Northcote Parkinson were writing his 1957 gem üParkinson’s Law@ today, he no doubt would have had something to say about computers.

One law would have been: Computer users will obtain as many program and data files as it takes to fill whatever size disk they happen to have.

Others would have been: The first time you do something new on a computer it will not work; a computer or program will cost twice as much as you think and will do only half the things you want it to do; the first time you show someone else a new trick you have learned on a computer it will embarrass you by not working. Attempts to upgrade a computer or a program will initially fail and attempts to restore it to the old position will also fail, usually rendering a computer useless at a critical time.
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SOUTH African journalist Anthony Heard pointed out this week that the murder of communist and ANC leader Chris Hani broke an unwritten rule: political leaders do not order each other’s assassinations.

Thus Saddam Hussein is still alive. An exploding cigar send to Havana or a bomb attack over Libya are exceptions, not the rule. Politicians have an understanding not to kill each other. They are the rules of the club or the union.

In politics there are only a few occasions where the common interests of the calling are put above the usual name-calling, denigration and muck-raking within it. I can think of only three others.
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People identify with a marathon runner. The marathon requires persistence and commitment, like life. It is a challenge.

Pat Clohessy has given that persistence and commitment, not in running marathons, but in coaching Australia’s best-known marathon runner, Robert de Castella since Deek was 14.

Tomorrow, 22 years later, Robert de Castella will run what is likely to be his last competitive marathon _ the London marathon.
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Aborigines are being jailed at 26 times the rate of whites in Australia despite an overall reduction in the number of people taken into custody, according to survey results published yesterday.

The Australian Institute of Criminology’s survey showed also that female Aboriginal custodies were 44 per cent of total female custodies, though they comprise only 1.5 per cent of the total female population.

It is the second survey of prisoners. The first was in 1988. It follows a recommendation by the Royal Commission in to Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. The survey covered every incident of custody (Aboriginal and white) in Australia in August, 1992, and was done in co-operation with all federal and state police forces.
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Being Australian wasn’t the exclusive province of the Republicans last night, as Andrew Denton mercilessly pointed out.

He leaned over the Minister for Health, Graham Richardson, condemning the unAustralian activities of the Keating Government.

“”I sit in the section of Qantas you didn’t sell to British Airways,” he said. “”I ate the few Arnotts biscuits you didn’t sell to Campbells.”
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IT IS very galling to have statements taken out of context. The South Australian judge who made the comments out a man being allowed to use “”rougher than usual handling” in obtaining the consent of his wife to sexual intercourse suffered from this. After a long and difficult rape case, the judge made a summing up in which he said: “”There is, of course, nothing wrong with a husband, faced with his wife’s initial refusal to engage in intercourse, in attempting, in an acceptable way, to persuade her to change her mind, and that may involve a measure of rougher than usual handling.”

This was taken out of the context of the trial and seized upon by many, including the Prime Minister, to make comments. The statement, by Justice Derek Bollen, came to light in January upon the hearing of a Crown appeal on questions of law. They sparked calls for the judge to apologise and for him to be sacked and for wide re-education of all judges.

Having taken that one statement out of context, a Democrat candidate for the South Australian Parliament started a petition calling for his sacking for his “”apparent support of violence in marriage”.
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Hydra was the monster in Greek legend with nine heads. Hercules, who was set the task of killing this monster, had some difficulty because every time he cut off a head, two would grow in its place. And thus Terry Connolly appears, sometimes twice or three times in a news bulletin and if you change channels, there is is again with two or three more heads on another bulletin.

The Deputy Chief Minister, Wayne Berry, on the other hand, is more like the Greek god Pluto: the god of the underground. He does not put his head up on the television anywhere near as much.

In other mainland states or territories or at the Federal level, this difference in style would not matter a great deal, but it will matter in the ACT, as we shall see.
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Instead of speaking to a mate about a ghost, he should have been lecturing Australia’s parliamentary drafters, or more pointedly, Australia’s Members of Parliament. Between them, they are responsible for the passing of legislation. And there is more and more of it each year. The trouble is the legislators and those advising them think that passing a law is the best way of dealing with a mischief.

When they pass a law they invariable try to think of every possible combination of events, people and places and make provision for them. They leave nothing to chance. The trend is to give precise meanings to words in the law and to define circumstances precisely, sot hat judges will know what to do. The laws get longer and longer. The ACT Motor Traffic Act, for example, is 250 pages long. It has a 53-word definition of “”headlamp”; and a 96-word definition of “”dipped”; and a 69-word definition of “”public place”.

Despite the length, however, we still come unstuck because, even leaving heaven out of it, there are more things on earth than dreamt of in the philosophy of those who draft the laws.

Thus is was that Justice Terence Higgins found in the ACT Supreme Court last week that an unlicensed man doing burn-outs in the car park of some flats in Lyons was not a breach of the law. The drafters, in their desire to define every thing had not thought of that one. The 69-word definition of “”public place” did not embrace the car park of the Lyons flats and so the man was acquitted of driving while disqualified and negligent driving.

Now anyone with an ounce of brain or morality knows that doing burn-outs in the car park of a block of flats is dangerous, wrong and should be punished. But the result of 250 pages of close-packed detailed definitions and descriptions of times, people and events results in the obvious being turned on its head. The judge is forced to say that this is not criminal conduct.

It is a very self-defeating way to go about making law. It is most noticeable in the corporate area.

In the past two years the Federal Parliament has passed about 1500 pages of corporate law. While everyone was carrying on about deregulating the labour market to create more efficiencies the capital and management markets were being stifled by regulation.

The result of all this regulatory detail has not been better corporate morality or more convictions for dishonesty. To the contrary. Detailed regulation in fact promotes dishonesty. Society now puts before managers and directors such detailed prescriptions of commercial conduct that it would be quite reasonable for them to conclude that conduct not proscribed is within the law and therefore within acceptable bounds of morality.

The corporations law has 33 pages devoted to duties of corporate officers and directors. It would be reasonable for a director to presume that this represented the totality of his or her obligations. Anything that fell outside such a detailed exposition would obviously be legal. Two thousand words are devoted to loans from a company to a director. Ah-ah, there is nothing about a company lending money to the trustee of a third cousin of the director’s father-in-law who has a company in the Hayman Islands. So that must be legal and right, even though if defeats the very purpose of the law.

How much easier to say: “”Directors will act honestly and diligently. Penalty five years.”

With that sort of law a lot of directors would think twice about seeking a company loan for cousin-in-law Alfonse to buy Hobie cats in the Hayman Islands.

The reason for not doing it this way has been that legislators in the past have been disappointed with some judges’ decisions. They have thought too many crooks have escaped through loopholes. So they tried to close the loopholes with massive regulation, only to create more loopholes. And even with this mass of regulation there is no evidence to suggest it catches more crooks (or once caught puts more crooks in jail) than the simpler laws of all. Indeed, the evidence points to the contrary.

The worst of it is that the vast majority of corporate office-holders are honest, but they are saddled with the regulations, too. They have to learn and fulfil a mass of reporting duties just so that a tiny few crooks might be caught. If they were actually caught there might be some justification for it.

This is creating mass inefficiency, just a the over-regulation of the labour market is.

It is also creating injustice and disrespect for the law as we see corporate crooks get off and disqualified drivers do burn outs in flats car parks with impunity. The new Parliament about to meet in Canberra has a great opportunity to fix it.

LAST week the chairman of the Press Council, Professor David Flint, called for an attack on the contempt law that fines and jails journalists for refusing to disclose confidential sources.

He thought the use of the implied freedom of political communication in the Constitution enunciated in the High Court last year should be used to this end. That freedom was used to strike out the Federal law restricting political advertisements in the electronic media at election time.

At the time the case came down, commentators thought it would be used in other cases to expand the right of free speech. It was fairly clear, however, that it could not be used to attack defamation laws because they provide, albeit in a very limited form, defences that enable free political communication. They strike a balance between an individual’s right to reputation against the public right to know, even if cogent arguments could be made that the balance is too heavily weighted in favour of the former. Further, communication is not prohibited before the event, it merely has to be justified afterwards.
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