1992_09_september_keating

It was a matinee performance of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde when Paul Keating addressed the National Press Club yesterday. No, Dr Hewson was not Dr Jekyll. True to Robert Louis Stevenson’s text, Paul Keating played both parts.

The first part was the prepared speech in which Keating played the mild-mannered Dr Jekyll. In this age of the 18-second grab, it is a role the public rarely sees. He put a carefully constructed argument with little rhetoric and lots of statistics and jargon from the Treasury.

“”30 per cent marginal income tax rate if business were to enjoy the $20 billion 70 per cent of households $25,000 each would be up to $25 a week worse off $90,000, they would find themselves up to $105 a week and up to $5460.”

Then I saw Rowan Atkinson. It was just like that skit where he falls asleep in church, slumps on the pew, and falls into a kneeling position without quite falling on the floor. Meanwhile, the sermon is droning in the background and you can’t quite make out any words, but the intonation is clearly that of a sermon.

Atkinson was two tables away. His eyes glazed over.small effects on output, the current account and employment analysis of the major elements negative effect on the economy . 10.1 per cent, 10.7 per cent.

Atkinson’s pupils rolled back. Yes, he was going to slump into the cheese just as 832,000 small businessmen were “”destined to become the new tax collectors for Dr Hewson”. The laughter jolted him, and his eyes darted around to see if anyone had seen him nodding.

Keating waded into payroll tax, so Atkinson was still not saved from the cheese plate. Tables of diplomats, retired and semi-active public servants, lawyers and political groupies barely stayed tuned. The matinee was a disappointment. It was well-argued case, but they had come for a performance. there is little difference between payroll tax and a tax on the value that is added to the products by labour. The economic effects of the payroll tax .

By now even Keating was getting bored with own prepared speech, like Jekyll bored with life. So he left out a great slab of it and Atkinson was saved from the cheese-plate.

Many in the audience had never seen a full performance of Keating as Jekyll: intelligent, softly spoken and well-reasoned. They had only seen him as Hyde, and only 18-second grabs of Hyde at that.

The ABC’s Jim Middleton, presiding, then administered the potion of transmogrification: “”We now move to questions.”

Dennis Grant of Channel Seven asked about pay television.

Immediately, the Treasury jargon was gone. Reason and politeness cast aside: “”You guys have given the GST a sleigh ride for a year now. And all we get is pay television.”

Grant persisted with a question about putting the ABC in the pay-television queue.

Keating: “”This question is not encouraging me to put Channel Seven in the queue.”

Keiren McLeonard from Network Radio was given an answer because of her colour co-ordination and red hair.

This was Hyde at his worse. Keating couldn’t help himself; he was charged by the drug of questions, and loving it. He was into humiliation and insults and colourful language. He insulted another journalist’s former publication and The Australian was just “”wrong”.

Atkinson, by now, was wide awake. However, there was not to be much more. Perhaps Keating, himself, like Jekyll, could see the danger. He cut the matinee short. There was the big performance to come on the Hill.

In that performance, Jekyll doesn’t get a role; it is all Hyde. It is, alas for Keating, the side that nearly all of the people only ever see him in.

And yesterday on the Hill he relished in it, saying to Dr Hewson with easily mustered vituperation that he would not call an early election: “”because I want to do you slowly, mate.”

One wonders, as more and more questions will be administered in the lead up to the next election, whether Dr Jekyll will ever be able to reassert himself at will.

1992_09_september_judicial

THOSE who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. And I am talking about recent history. Remember the Murphy affair and more recently the Greiner affair. Much of the uncertainty and injustice done in the those cases resulted from the words in the Constitution and the ICAC Act, respectively, about judging the conduct of public officials.

The Judicial Commissions Bill has just been tabled in the ACT Legislative Assembly. It sets out the procedure for the removal of judicial officers for misbehaviour or incapacity. Yet it doing so it uses very similar words to those that caused so much controversy in the Greiner and Murphy cases.

To be fair, the Bill goes some way to address the difficulties that faced Parliament in the Murphy case, but not completely.
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1992_09_september_judge

The ACT Chief Justice, Justice Jeffrey Miles, says the ACT judiciary is not fully independent.

In the latest Australian Law Journal he has expressed concern that present legislative arrangements mean an ACT government could do an ACT Supreme Court judge what the Federal Government did to Justice Jim Staples.

Justice Staples was a member of the Arbitration Commission. Legislation abolished that commission, replacing it with the Industrial Relations Commission, but Justice Staples was not reappointed to the new body. No allegation of misconduct was ever made against him.
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1992_09_september_health

The ACT health budget for this financial year will be cut and jobs and probably services will be affected.

The cut is 2.5 per cent. Health will receive $219.2 million from the Consolidated Fund in the 1992-93 ACT Budget to be brought down by the Chief Minister and Treasurer, Rosemary Follett, on September 15.

The information comes in a departmental document apparently prepared either for the Chief Minister or the Minister for Health.
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1992_09_september_health7

The ACT health system is too top-heavy, according to the Opposition spokeswoman on health, Kate Carnell.

She said yesterday that greater efficiencies were needed to overcome the budget problem.

“”We have sacrificed efficiency for industrial peace for too long,” she said.

Ms Carnell was commenting on a report in üThe Canberra Times@ yesterday giving an overview of the ACT health budget to be brought down by the ACT Government later this month. The details were contained in a departmental document obtained by üThe Canberra Times.@
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1992_09_september_guide

The ACT Public Service wants 25% of all job applicants to be women before short lists are drawn up.

Guidelines have been drawn up to help managers achieve the goal. They have been circulated in at least one ministry, Attorney-General’s, Housing and Community Services and Urban Services.

The head of the department, Chris Hunt, said yesterday, “”It is important to get women to apply in areas where they might think were male-dominated.”
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1992_09_september_green

The case came in the same week as a very public ding-dong about the prosecution of corporate crime. The public perception is that the corporate crims get away with it, probably because they have smart lawyers.

The Director of Public Prosecutions, Michael Rozenes, has given an other couple of reasons. One was that the corporate watchdogs are more interested in protecting shareholders and creditors than in jailing crooks. The other was that the judge and the lawyers are not the smartest people in the courtroom, rather the corporate crims is.

Very few plead guilty. Greenburg is, so far the only woman.

Greenburg is the other end of the corporate-prosecution injustice. When you have no money left, or no family with money left to pay the high-class lawyers, there is no bargaining power. The easy way out of restitution, civil penalties and plea bargaining is not available.
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1992_09_september_forests

Conservation groups representing 400,000 Australians have rejected the Government’s draft national forest policy and called for plantation harvesting.

They have sent a detailed submission to the Prime Minister, Paul Keating, saying that logging of native forests is unnecessary, uneconomic and not as productive as plantation timber.

The submission says the present policy has cost $4.5 billion in public debt. Australia could be self-sufficient in paper fibre by 1995 using plantation pulpwood, residues from plantation sawmills and increased recycling. Softwood from plantation aged 25-40 years could replace the vast majority of uses met from native forests.
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1992_09_september_flight

The trashy novel was predicting sudden death. I was reading it on Flight AN4 to Darwin. It was a trashy novel but a prescient one.

The American accent came over the inter-com: “”Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Captain Miller. Today, we will be tracking over Longreach, Mount Isa and Katherine on route to Darwin. Our arrival time is now anticipated at 12.55pm Central Time. We do apologise for the current air turbulence and we do suggest you keep your seat belts fastened at this time.”

Since the pilots’ strike and the influx of American pilots, airlinebabble has become even more long-winded. The mellowness that comes with the American belief in giving service has replaced the clipped British tradition of giving orders. The word “”now” smacks of bossing people about, so it is replaced in airlinebabble with “”at this time”.
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1992_09_september_engine

The public appears to have a higher regard for of engineers than the engineers have of themselves, according to a survey published yesterday.

Women tend to have a higher regard for them than men, but those surveyed as a whole were more reluctant to recommend their daughter for an engineering career than their son.

However, people think engineering is for others: 76 per cent would recommend it for young males, but only 47 per cent for their sons and 46 per cent would recommend it for a young female but only 33 per cent for their own daughter.
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