Crispin Hull

Prime Minister, Paul Keating, and the Leader of the Opposition, John Hewson, are now committed to looking at whether a referendum should be held for a four-year term.

The theory is that a longer term would provide better economic management and enable politicians to make the tough decisions without fear of an immediate electoral backlash. They could be making long-term decisions which would bear fruit further down the track. This would be better for the nation. Great theory. But wrong.

What has been the Australian experience? All states except Queensland now have four year terms. Could anyone seriously argue that Victoria, South Australia or Western Australia were better managed under their four-year terms than Queensland under its three-year term? The contrary is demonstrably true. The Cain-Kirner and Burke-Lawrence four years were not brilliant examples of prudent economic management. The longer term only meant that voters had to put up with those Governments for one year longer than they should have. Carmel Lawrence used the extra year to do a repair job and went some distance in doing it. However, Joan Kirner did not make things any better in her state while the voters waited to throw her out. South Australia was similarly mismanaged under John Bannon and now the voters have to wait out an unnecessary extra year to get rid of Lynn Arnold’s lame-duck Government. Tasmania’s four-year term did not save it from an early election after the breakdown of the Green-Labor Accord, and its finances are still fairly sick. Queensland, the only state with a three-year term, is the only state which has had sound financial management over the past half decade. The Australian experience shows there is no case for a four-year term on economic grounds, or indeed on any other ground.

Queenslanders very sensibly rejected a referendum proposal for a four-year term in March 1991. When they look at what has happened in the other states since they can be proud of their decision.
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A UE1 JUDGMENT in the Federal Court on Thursday has shown serious weaknesses in the Government’s pay-television policy. The judgment itself was confined to a narrow point of statutory interpretation. It did not canvass the broader issues and the court was not invited to do so. None the less, the judgment ruled that the Minister for Communications, Senator Bob Collins, had acted beyond power in making a decision about the issuing of multi-point distribution system (MDS) licences.

Until very recently it was thought that MDS technology had only limited application to domestic television. When it was realised that MDS could be used for city-wide domestic pay TV, the Government attempted to stop a tender process under way for the issuance of further MDS licences.

The Government’s action put a spoke in the wheels of two businesses which had intended to use the technology. One was Steve Cosser’s Australis which wanted to launch a domestic pay-TV service in Sydney and Melbourne. The other was Kerry Stokes’s Australian Capital Equity which wanted to use the technology for other purposes, probably text and high-quality radio transmission. ACE successfully sought to have the Minister’s action declared invalid. As a result the Government must serious rethink its pay-TV direction.

It must be said that Kerry Stokes, through a family company, owns The Canberra Times, but he has not had any input in the preparation of editorial matter on the subject. In any event, his aims were not specifically directed at pay TV. He was caught up in a wider web. The broad question is not and never has been the delivery of text and still graphics through MDS which is Mr Stokes’s interest. The broad question is pay TV.
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Prime Minister, Paul Keating, has said that if the Coalition wins the election he would allow the GST legislation through, but would combine with the Democrats to defeat the Coalition’s industrial-relations legislation.

He says that the GST would be a money Bill and therefore should pass. On the other hand, he says that because the Coalition had not presented its IR Bill before the election it would not have a mandate for it.

The arguments are specious and ill-founded.

Mr Keating no doubt is still smarting from the Whitlam dismissal in 1975. That watershed in Australian politics is an event likely to colour perceptions of the role of the Senate in Australian politics, and rightly so.
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Electrical workers employed by the ACT Electricity and Water, through their union, have entered into an enterprise agreement with their management about wages and conditions. They have lodged it with the Industrial Relations Commission. There is no cogent reason why that agreement should not go ahead and the parties who entered into it should be able to rely upon it.

However, the Minister for Industrial Relations, Wayne Berry, does not like it. He says that it runs counter to an agreement with 15 other unions about wages and conditions throughout the ACT Public Service. He thinks that the ACTEW agreement could jeopardise that agreement.

At Mr Berry’s instigation, it appears that the ACT Cabinet will overturn the enterprise agreement.

Mr Berry’s position is at odds with the general trend in industrial relations to break down monolithic structures and to enable and empower workers in given enterprises to work out their own conditions with their own managements.
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An application to stop the Australian Electoral Commission from prosecuting people urging voters to vote informal is to go before the High Court on Monday.

The application is being made by Albert Langer, of Melbourne. Mr Langer has distributed a leaflet urging people to vote informal by writing “”a plague on all their houses” on the ballot paper.

The commission has drawn Mr Langer’s attention to Section 329A of the Electoral Act, which was passed late last year. It prohibits people from distributing matter encouraging people to vote informally and provides a penalty of six month’s jail.
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Hill Station Restaurant is to close and the ACT is in danger of losing the site as a function and heritage centre, according to proprietors.

The proprietors, Paul Smith and Derek Lyall, said yesterday that government inaction and uncommercial lease conditions set by the landlord made it impossible for them to continue. They will close the restaurant, art gallery, the country village and teahouse and antique sales at the end of May.

They had an option to renew their lease for a further three years, but it was not a commercial proposition for them on the terms offered. They had spent thousands of dollars fixing the homestead and other buildings and repairing the grounds. They had bought all the furnishings and restaurant fittings. The landlords had not helped with that.

They had also to keep a watching eye over development in the nearby Hume industrial estate to ensure that businesses did not encroach on the tranquillity of the homestead. That should have been a task of government.
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Private land development in the ACT has been attacked by both ACT Government officials and a commissioner of the Industry Commission.

The commissioner said it was not competitive enough because there were only three developers and officials said it made housing less affordable.

The commissioner also said that the push for medium-density housing did not always enlarge housing choices, but removed the choice already made by existing residents.

The Industry Commission has been inquiring into the efficiency of cities. The ACT Government was giving its response to an interim Industry Commission report before Commissioners Banks and Rolfe, a transcript of which was made available last week.
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So the ALP is to introduce a GST after all. What? Do not fear, it will be a very limited one: it will apply only to the sale of blank audio tapes.

The Government will be forced into imposing this limited GST because of a High Court ruling this week. For a long time, musicians and others have not been able to enforce their copyright. People have merrily copied CDs and vinyl on to blank audio tapes in their homes without fear of Jimmy Barnes, Eric Clapton or Sir George Solti knocking the door demanding a copyright fee. The technology of audio tapes leapt ahead of the copyright law.

After more than a decade of farnarkling, the Federal Parliament finally came up with a scheme in 1989 that would provide recording artists just rewards for their intellectual creation. (I hesitate to use the word “”music” to describe some of the more hideous outpourings of the recording industry.) The scheme was to hit the retailers of audio tape with a levy. The money raised would then go to various representatives of recording artists for distribution roughly according to the number of original CDs and vinyls sold.
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Blockline: Residents of Darebin Place Conder gather around the notice on Block 20 that seeks a change of lease-purpose clause to change the block to medium density. All the residents of a the place have objected citing increased traffic as a danger to their children and concern for the mature gum trees in the background.

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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