Crispin Hull

Last week some figures were published from the professional standards director of the ACT Law Society, Tony Kidney, on complaints about lawyers.

They were contained in the society’s Gazette and republished in The Canberra Times. It showed there were 156 complaints to the society against lawyers in 1995.

Guess what? Not one complaint was upheld. Are we to conclude that all the lawyers in town are beyond reproach and the 156 complainants are whingers with no cause? Or is the complaints system a ground for complaint? What confidence would any ordinary member of the ACT public dealing with lawyers have in a system that yields a 156-to-0 result.

True, four lawyers were dealt with by the Supreme Court in 1995 for cases arising in previous years. Two of those arose from a complaint by another lawyer that his fees were not paid in a timely or proper way. One arose out of a criminal fraud charge and another arose out of a taxation case. Not come arose from a complaint by an ordinary member of the public.

I don’t think that the people responsible for the administration of the system are at fault. The trouble is the rules they work under and the fact that the ACT Law Society has managed to prevent significant change to the system and the ACT Assembly is too spineless to take it up.
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The goods and services tax is slowly capturing the low, middle and high ground.

The GST is becoming more popular among people for very different reasons. There is an odd alliance between business and social-welfare groups to support a GST. These two extremes of the income table have the most to lose or the most to gain from a GST, depending solely upon how it is implemented. For middle-income groups is not likely to make much difference immediately, but they are in there with support.

The middle ground support is reflected in the latest Bulletin poll which shows that 56 per cent are in favour of it and 37 against. Coalition voters are much more likely to support it. But the swing towards a GST is perhaps more a result of dissatisfaction with the present system, than an open embrace of a GST. The poll showed also that 66 per cent of people thought the present system needed to change.

The middle-ground PAYE taxpayers appear to be saying they are sick of being ripped off with ever higher income taxes being taken out of their pay while the high income earners escape through negative gearing, trusts, income-splitting and other avoidance schemes and people on low incomes get unearned money from the government.

The lower income earners have a different reason for supporting a GST. The Australian Council of Social Service and others are concerned that the tax base is narrowing and that in turn is causing governments to cut spending on the needy in society. They would support a broadening of the tax base to include a GST, provided it did not mean low-income earners were hit harder and provided it meant that overall revenues would rise so that governments had more money for the needy.
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Section 13 of the Constitution puts some practical obstacles in the way of an early double dissolution.

Assuming the Senate knocks one or more Bills back twice, Prime Minister John Howard can call his double dissolution and force the Bills through a joint sitting afterwards if the Senate remains hostile … using extra numbers in the Reps to overcome the one or two seats that the goverment is likley to be short of a majority in the Senate. (And for the past two decades no government has got a majority in the Senate, and none is likley to in the forseeable future.)

However, after a double dissolution, the election for the Reps and the Senate are likely to get seriously out of kilter because of Section 13.

That section says that after a normal election and half-Senate election, like that on March 2, senators take their seats on the (ital) following (end ital) July 1. But after a double dissolution they are deemed to have taken their seats on the (ital) preceding (end ital) July 1.
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Assertions by staff at the Australian Tax Office that staff shortages and budget cuts are the cause of the Tax Office missing out of large amount of revenue from Australia’s very wealthy is only part of the story.

That assertion was taken up and agreed to by the Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley. To some extent both are self-serving.

The major cause of loss of revenue is the fact that the Keating Government trumpeted the closing of $800 million worth of tax-avoidance schemes during the election campaign. He did so for short-term political advantage so that he could magically fund election promises.

But his announcement put the dodgers on notice so they could rearrange their affairs and move their money.

The Canberra Times published on February 16 details of the avoidance schemes and the outrage by tax staff on February 16 that Mr Keating and then Treasurer Ralph Willis had blown their cover.
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Before the election, John Howard appeared to put the question of the republic on the same plane as the creation of a new nation.

He promised to have a people’s convention out of which would come a consensus to either do nothing or for a model for a republic. If the latter, it would be put to a referendum of the whole people.

That way of going about constitutional change was used in the 1890s when the six colonies formed a federation and Australia became a nation. It was roughly the same model used by the various British and other European colonies in Africa and elsewhere. It was used to usher in the great fundamental changes in South Africa this decade.

Howard now seems, quite rightly, to recognise that the constitutional change required to formally change Australia from a constitutional monarchy to a republic is not on that level … at least constitutionally and legally speaking, even though it is symbolically. There is no need for a convention sledge hammer to crack the republic walnut.
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So a referendum on weapons is in the air.

On this one, John Howard can sweep aside not only the recalcitrant state and territory ministers who are too dumb to read the public mood, but also Cheryl Kernot and others in the Senate who might try to insist that their wording goes to the people, not the Government’s. And you can be sure that the Democrats will have a different idea of what question should be posed than the Government.

Most people assume that both House of Parliament have to pass a Bill for a referendum. Not so. In the past, both Houses have always agreed to the wording of the proposes constitutional change. But strictly speaking, the Constitution provides that it is only necessary for one House and the Governor-General to agree and the referendum can go to the people. In practice, the Governor-General means the Government, and as the Government has always been the majority party in the House of Representatives (bar a couple of odd exceptions), it means that the Government can put its own wording to the people.

Referendums to change the Constitution are governed by Section 128 of the Constitution. The referendum would not be for the people to decide on a detailed regime of weapons control, but rather to give the Commonwealth Parliament power to legislate about weapons, so that its laws would override state laws. For example, the Commonwealth might ban a crimped automatic rifle and Western Australia might allow it. In this case the Commonwealth law would prevail.
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The position of ACT Chief Planner and an independent statutory planning body will all but disappear under the ACT Government’s new model for planning put forward in response to the Stein report.

Save Our City Coalition spokesperson Jacqui Rees said yesterday that the coalition had documents showing the new structure without any position for Chief Planner. This was required by federal and ACT statutes.

The Government’s new structure is to put planning and land management together in the Department of Urban Services under an executive director of planning and land management with three subordinates in charge of planning and administration of the Territory Plan, land supply and sales, changes to lease purposes, design and siting and building approvals.

A spokesman for Planning Minister Gary Humphries said the Chief Planner’s position would not disappear, but that title and the title executive director would be held by the same person.
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Here we go again … another round of ACT planning and land restructuring, following the same pattern and mistakes as all the previous ones. These are broadly threefold:

DOT To rip off the ordinary people of Canberra so a few people can profit handsomely.

DOT To assume that higher-densities automatically provides for efficiency and less environmental harm.

DOT To assume that construction is a Good Thing that will always bring jobs and wealth to the city.

Both the Liberal and Labor Party have done it. It is done by keeping as much power over land administration and planning in the hands of government departments and minimising independent professional planning through a statutory authority answerable to the Assembly, as the self-government legislation requires.

The federal ACT (Planning and Land Management) Act requires the Assembly “”to make laws for the establishment of a territory planning authority” which shall have the functions of “”preparing and administering a plan”.
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The dog kennel I made at the weekend cost about 30 bucks, a huge saving on the $210 job at the pet store … or so I smugly thought.

Most of it came from bits of packing timber lying around The Canberra Times after the installation of the new press. The nails were left over from when I built a deck a decade ago, and the insulation and ceiling liner was left over from the garage conversion half a decade ago.

The insulation was necessary because an ACT building regulation requires a four-star energy rating for all new construction. Like all good building regulations, it has nothing to do with the requirements of the occupant … a samoyed with enough hair to insulate himself. Indeed, one of Sir Douglas Mawson’s dogs was a samoyed and his dogs stayed outside kennel-less in Antarctica. This samoyed, incidentally, has been called Mawson, after the great explorer, and predictably enough, his kennel is called Mawson’s Hut.

Unlike the real hut, this is one is carpeted with off-cut given to me by a bloke at Endeavour Carpets. (I’m not usually into John Laws-style plugs, but this bloke didn’t know who I was and was being genuine generous, so deserves some credit).
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The design of the new Magistrates’ Court building in Civic is a shocker from the journalists’ viewpoint.

The architects took me around this week, explaining how accused people in police custody will come from the police station and arrive underground. They then get unloaded and go through separate stairs, corridors and doors to pop up in the dock in the courtroom.

“”But what about our photographers taking dramatic pictures of the accused, head covered with a blanket being led from paddy wagon to court entrance?” I asked ruefully.

This is not a building designed for the media, but an elegant solution to a lot of demands and constraints: political; economic; practical and geographic.

The ACT courts needed a purpose-built courthouse, as its courts were scattered through the city creating security and efficiency problems. The Supreme Court has preferred to think of itself as a federal court, and awaited a federal response. This enabled the magistrates’ court people to play up to the ACT Government to secure a building for itself, leaving the Supreme Court in the old building.
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