Crispin Hull

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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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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