Crispin Hull

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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At the last ACT election in February, the people voted (nearly 70-30) for the Hare-Clark system and the Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett, quite rightly says she will give effect to the choice.

More technically, the people voted for “”a proportional representation (subs round brackets are correct) (Hare-Clark) system (as outlined in the Commonwealth’s Referendum Options Description Sheet”.

The description sheet provided for the Robson rotation which hacks into party factional power. It provides that the order of a party’s candidates be changed on different voters’ ballot papers. Voter 1 get a paper with Berry at Labor’s No 1 spot. Voter 2 gets a paper with Connolly’s name at the No 1 spot and so on. Thus voters have to think about the order they want to place the candidates in, rather than just accepting the party line. More of this later.
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It would impossible to draw three electorates in the ACT without splitting one or more of the major townships, according to the Liberal spokesman on electoral matters, Gary Humphries.

This made it more important for the boundaries not to be drawn by the proposed ACT Electoral Commission as suggested by the Government.

Mr Humphries thought the Chief Territory Planner and the Auditor-General should draw the boundaries, to add expertise and greater independence.
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