Crispin Hull

There was something missing from the Prime Minister’s promise this week to cut company tax and to provide cash rebates for child care. Where was the independent inquiry? Where was the reference to the parliamentary committee? Where was the inter-departmental committee? Where were the public submissions?

Why is it that on some occasions, our politicians can virtually click their fingers and announce major legislative and policy changes, yet on other occasions we get a raft of inquiries and submissions and nothing ever gets done. üYes Minister’s@ Sir Humphrey is right, if you don’t want to do something, have an inquiry. And thus is was with the inquiry by the Senate Standing Committee on Legal Constitutional Affairs into the cost of justice. In effect, it recommended further inquiry. Further inquiry is not needed. The community knows that justice is too costly and is invariably delayed. In other words jusstice is denied.

It is now no longer a question of cost overruns in a fews cases, or a few people not being able to afford access to the legal system. Australia is now at the stage where only the very wealthy and the desperately poor with legal aid can go to court. And the blame for this state of affairs must be squarely laid at the legal profession.
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The ABC was given the site decades ago for nothing for the purposes of broadcasting. It was a worthy, community cause and the Government at the time thought they should get the lease. The long-term aim was to put the ABC’s national headquarters there and to house radio and television reporting teams for Parliament and the national capital. Some of those aims have changed. The ABC has substantial studios at Parliament and will never bring its headquarters here. Further, it has dropped its local television news, so it no longer requires a spacious TV studio at Northbourne Avenue.

Thus the ABC has come up with the idea that a developer could come in and use part of the site for commercial purposes or medium-density housing and on the rest of the site build the ABC a shiny new radio studio for nothing. The Uniting Church did the same thing in the 1980s on a Civic site it had been given for nothing decades before. The old church in town was knocked over. Two-thirds of the site went to commercial offices and the church got a shiny new place of worship and some new offices for itself.

The practice must stop. The ABC was given the site for broadcasting, not for commercial development. If the site is too big, the ABC should hand it back and ask for a smaller, more suitable site elsewhere. The ACT community can understand the ABC’s difficulty. It has a huge site and buildings which cost $300,000 a year to maintain. A smaller site would cost half that to maintain.
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Some quite understandable movements have gained hold in public life in Australia seeking to change attitudes and to change priorities in public funding. Broadly, they seek a better deal for groups of people who have been repressed or marginalised. Some have sought changes to they way Australian authorities approach foreign policy, foreign aid, public health and legal aid. Often, those groups have sought and received most succour from the people within Australia’s universities. The universities, for long the haven of dissent and challenge in society, promoted, joined in and welcomed the the changes.

Now the universities find that the very changes people within the universities supported are being turned on the universities themselves. Equalitiy, non-discrimination and gender-equity are suddenly being applied to education. Suddenly, we had a clash of ideology among people who otherwise were allied in favour of change. The underlying culture of universities was under challenge by new political correctness. Equality of outcome had no place in a culture of pursuit of excellence. Positive discrimination had no place in a culture of judgment on merit. Study of ephemeral phenonema had no place in a culture of academic discipline. Worse still, pursuit of knowledge had no place in a political culture that worshipped mediocrity.

The early 1990s has seen the social idealism of the 1970s implode. The radicalism of the 1970s that sought great changes in government is now faced with the consequences of its own folly on the the campuses in the 1990s.
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The $350,000 awarded to Andrew Ettingshausen is plainly over the top. Under NSW law, juries determine damages for defamation under guidance from the judge. The judge did his best, and even warned the jury that an impossibly high verdict would only be turned over on appeal. However, the jury apparently wanted to make a statement about the intrusive press and to vindicate Ettingshausen. Whatever the merit in its motives, the vehicle for expressing them _ huge damages _ was inappropriate and in the long run will achieve nothing. Ettingshausen will now have to await the inevitable appeal process, maybe years, before he sees any money.

The $350,000 will only further jaundice people’s view of the legal system. The public will be as cynical as they were over Leo McLeay’s $65,000 for falling off a bike. At least Mr McLeay suffered some permanent injury. To get $350,000 in a personal-injury case, one would have to lose a leg or suffer some very major permanent injury. The maximum amount for pain and suffering in personal injury (as distinct from loss of earnings) in NSW is about $100,000. How can the pain and suffering of a paraplegic after a car accident be compared to that of a fit man seeing a picture of himself naked? The law, however, does not permit judges or lawyers to inform juries about going rates for personal-injuries claims.

The awarding of damages must be taken out of the hands of juries and be made by judges. Juries are equally capable of awarding ridiculously low amounts. The trouble is that, in defamation in particular, they appear to respond to prejudice and personal feeling. Footballers do better than politicians. If judges award damages they can do so with accompanying words. They can express disquiet about press behaviour and a plaintiff’s good conduct in words without resort to huge damages, which is the only weapon of a jury. Huge damages awards will only result in inequities that cause the public to view the law as an ass or a lottery.
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Clearly none of the six majority senators of the committee on legal and constitutional affairs have had much to do with the victims of courts and the law in Australia.

Judging by the recommendations they brought down last week, they have been either subverted by the legal profession or they are blind. Their findings are contradictory and their suggested remedies will only make the situation worse.

On Page 5 they say: “”The committee believes that Australia has a basically sound legal system which nevertheless is in urgent need of substantial reform. The disrepair is of such a degree that is will require continual attention who share the responsibility for the situation and who, through that responsibility, have an opportunity to contribute to making the system what it should be.”
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Here’s some speculation about land in the ACT, in the light of the push to medium-density development.

Have you ever wondered why the ACT is so large? Why do we need 2359 sq km just to house the national capital?

The answer goes back to the great constitutional debates of 1890s. Political and regional jealousy among the delegates ensured that neither Sydney nor Melbourne could be the capital, so a new one would have to be created. The compromise was that Melbourne would house the national Parliament until a new capital was founded. When founded it would be somewhere in NSW, but at least 160km from Sydney.
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The losses are made clear in company returns on the public register at the Australian Securities Commission.

It is the closest Australia comes to the American system under which the President makes his tax return public each year.

Dr Hewson has two family companies, Brintmar Holdings Pty Ltd and Tobazo Pty Ltd.

Last year Tobazo lost $12,165 and Brintmar lost $4380. The companies are now worth $292,778 and $27,294 respectively, totalling $320,072. The 1991 financial year was better for the companies with profits totalling $56,717.
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The Australian Labor Party made a fundamental change yesterday. With the statement of the Prime Minister, Paul Keating, the Labor Party invested its hopes of change in society, and its hopes for re-election, in small and medium companies.

The change was accompanied by both rhetoric and practical policy.

For the first time in Labor Party history, the principal vehicle of modern industrial capitalism _ the limited liability company _ has been promoted by the Labor Party as the leading positive force of social and economic change that will benefit soceity and Labor’s principal constituents in particular.

In the past, Labor had seen companies as a force of exploitation of its constituents, to be met by counter-acting organisations, namely unions. More recently they have been seen as a merely neutral force or a necessary evil. In the past, companies were capital’s collective and unions were labour’s collective. It was different yesterday.
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A leading education adviser to both Liberal and Labor Governments has attacked the trend under Labor to amalgamation and centralised control of universities.

Professor Peter Karmel said, “”A reversal of recent trends is essential in the long term interests of Australia.”

He rejected the cult of bigness which had little merit for undergraduate teaching. He said the present system would “”steer universities towards a centrally determined set of values and priorities”.

Professor Karmel, chairman of the board of the Institute of Arts at ANU and former vice-chancellor of the ANU, has been on numerous government educational and economic advisory committees since the 1960s. He was giving a speech to a conference for student organisations interested in education policy in Melbourne a copy of which was made available last week.
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The annual return of the company owned by the family of the Leader of the Opposition, John Hewson, has not been filed on its due date, according to the publicly available record.

A search of the Australian Securities Commission record yesterday revealed that the annual return of Brintmar Holdings Pty Ltd, the Hewson family company, was due to be filed on January 31, but had not been filed by yesterday, according to the public record. This is a minor breach of the Corporations Law.

To be in time, the company should have filed the return on Friday. It is possible that the return has been filed, but not yet put on the public register.
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