Crispin Hull

It was suggested last week that Canberra be nominated for world-heritage listing. The suggestion is ill-founded in both logic and common-sense.

Let us draw and analogy. The English common law has as one of its many elements some principles of property law. It recognises several estates in land, two of which are estates in fee simple and entail.

Estates in fee enable the owner to do what he likes. Estates entail enable the owner to enjoy the profits of the estate and to live on it, but require its maintenance and its passing to the eldest son indefinitely down the family line. The estate entail was aimed at preserving the family lands for the family, down the male line, indefinitely.
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An experiment with drugs has been going on in Australia for ninety years. Those doing the experiment have added more and more ingredients over the years, applied more and more potency to the catalysts, and poured greater amounts of money into it. But no matter, the experiment is not coming out the way its designers thought. In fact, the experiement is coming up with results exactly opposite from those intended.

The drug-prohibition experiment is not working and has never worked. An experiement designed to reduce drug use and to reduce the detriment it has on society is having exactly the opposite effect. Drug use is continuing and increasing. Worse, the prohibition policy means we now have two problems instead of one: not just a health problem from drug misuse, but a crime problem caused directly by the prohibition experiment.

Some misguided, naive parliamentarians imagined that if they made the possession of drugs illegal, they could change people’s behaviour. Moreover, they congratulated themselves in a self-validating way by saying they were stamping out an evil which obviously was an evil because it was against the law.
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John Bannon’s resignation as Premier of South Australia last September can now be seen for what is was: not a man putting party and colleagues before self, but a quick exit before the curtain inevitably came down on a saga on ineptitude. The findings brought down yesterday by the Jacobs Royal Commission into the State Bank of South Australia do not reveal rottenness on the scale of WA Inc, but they reveal some appalling commercial blunders and profound structural weaknesses in the relationship between the bank and the politicians. Put simply, if John Bannon had tried to tough it out in September he would have had to resign yesterday. He earlier resignation will not remove the taint on his colleagues which will have its inevitably effect at the election next year. South Australians will realise, as surely as Victorians did, that financial mismanagement of that scale is inexcusable.

The new Premier, Lynn Arnold, attempted to distance his government from the bank’s $3.15 billion losses. He said the commissioner Samuel Jacobs, QC, had not discovered an SA Inc and that there was no deliberate cover-up by Mr Bannon or any other member of the Government. Even accepting Mr Arnold’s view of commission’s findings, that only shows the Government was not dishonest. It was still incompetent, and incompetent on a grand scale. Mr Arnold attempted to sheet blame on to the bank’s chief executive, Tim Marcus Clarke. This is untenable.
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The scene was a primary school fete in a country town in Victoria. Many came but little was chosen. By the end of the day much produce was left over.

In that recessed state nothing should go to waste. But it was about to. The very recession which made waste such a crime was making it more likely; few could afford to buy. So the organisers held the home-made cakes and scones aloft and let the go for a song: 50 cents or less.

It must have broken the hearts of the mums and dads who had sweated over the stove to make cakes to raise money for their kids’ school.
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The displaying of that sense yesterday (mon2nov) helps explain why John Hewson is having such trouble selling his GST and slash-and-burn industrial-relations policy.

It does not have much to do with Hewson’s personality. Rather, Kelly says, Paul Keating, as recession Treasurer, has made the Australian people shell-shocked, quivering and in search of security and stability in their lives. The last thing they want, therefore, is the security blanket pulled from under them by Hewson’s radical policies.

People were scared of Hewson because Keating had made them insecure, he said. Keating had inadvertently made the task of the radical reformer that much harder.
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This is the story of Fyodor (his real name). He was a gambler. His life was wrecked by it. Between his destructive bouts of gambling, he was a creative man. He wrote the finest description of the gambling affliction that has ever been written. No amount of new journalism in the vein of “”John (not his real name)”, can ever hope to capture better the euphoric agony of the compulsive gambler. It is best, therefore, that his words tell his story.

It started with watching his grandmother playing roulette.

“”Grandmother could barely sit still. He blazing eyes were simply devouring the little ball as it bounced along the notches of the spinning wheel. Grandmother was losing control, she couldn’t keep still in her seat.
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Television has insidious effects and viewers should be more active in understanding them and controlling their habit, according to a Canadian researcher.

The researcher is Gaston Gauthier. He argued at the National Family Summit at Parliament House yesterday that when television arrived “”the family and society as a whole at the time were seduced”.

“”They did not see that their family relations would give way to very different ones,” he said. “”They did not see that, in watching television, their family relations would give way to very different ones. They did not see that in watching television, their relations became distant relations with imaginary beings.”
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He was drunk at the time. Coming to his senses he swears off the grog for 20 years. It was England in the mid-nineteenth century. Thus opens Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge.

Such things were not confined to fiction, according to a myth-debunking presentation at the National Family Summit this week.

While the brazen vote-enticing speeches given by Paul Keating and John Hewson snatched the front pages and lead television items, far more prescient and cerebral things were stated by other speakers. Ita Buttrose, the organiser of the conference, warned that political parties would ignore the family at their peril. A pity she could not warn the media that they would ignore her non-political speakers at their peril.
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Ita Buttrose, the organiser of this week’s national summit on the family, and the Australian Institute of Family Studies have been presented with a special award by the United Nations in recognition of their work in improving the social and emotional status of Australian families. The awards were presented in Canberra on Thursday night. Miss Buttrose was also made a patron of the International Year of the Family, which is to be held in 1994. The head of the institute, Dr Don Elgar, accepted the award on the institute’s behalf.

Miss Buttrose said the future of the family and Australia’s children was not a matter for governments to solve on their own.< pc Point to newsfeature on families plse

Michael Moore’s Education (Amendment) Bill went straight into the too-hard basket last week. There it will stay until the next case arises.

Moore put the Bill up because of the expulsion in March of eight boys from Canberra Grammar School. It provides for an independent board of review to look at expulsions and suspensions of longer than 10 days. A student or parent could appeal and the board could either affirm or overturn the decision. The board would have educationalists from government and independent sector, a lawyer, the Community Advocate and a representative of the Association of Independent Schools.

The Bill would have applied to private as well as independent schools. The Liberal and Labor Party will not support it, so Moore, an Independent, will let it lie on the table. Presumably, he wants to cry “”I told you so” when the next case comes up.
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