Crispin Hull

Expediency comes before consistency in Australian politics. For decades the Coalition parties have championed states’ rights and the benefits of devolving power to the states to avoid duplication. For years they have denounced the Federal Labor Government for … as they would say … abusing the foreign affairs power in the Constitution to intrude into areas traditionally the preserve of the states.

Then they get into government. The high-sounding principles are discarded and one of their first laws is to use the foreign-affairs power to override state employment law. The Coalition has said it will use international labour and political covenants that enshrine freedom of association to overturn law proposed by the NSW government to give preference to unionists.

Now, compulsory unionism is an anathema and any law that insists an employer preference to a unionist over anyone else when hiring is discriminatory. However, the Coalition’s use of the foreign affairs-power and its overriding of state law is rank hypocrisy. It is using the end to justify a means which it has condemned in the past. If it had acknowledged that governments should be able to call on all constitutional powers to pursue their political aims, then no-one could quarrel.
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We must be grateful to Independent Michael Moore and Labor and Green MLAs for their great concern over the games we play. It is obvious that playing paintball will lead to the hard stuff. Once they try paintball people will want the real thing. They’ll want bullets. They’ll want to kill people. And once they are allowed to drop washable paint in paddocks, where will it end? Farmers might use the precedent and demand to paint fences and sheds instead of leaving them in their natural state as they should.

And the people of the ACT clearly should be prevented from any possibility of hurting themselves while they engage in recreation. Where will it end? People might want to throw leather balls at each other with only the protection of a piece of willow to fend it off. They might want to engage in the dangerous practice of attaching wheels to their feet. Or worse, they might join together to see if they can get a larger piece of leather over a line that has been … shock, horror … PAINTED on the grass, and non-native grass at that.
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Dick Smith is understandably annoyed that the $2 million helicopter he offered to the ACT as a rescue craft has been sitting idle in a hangar for 10 months while he has had to pay insurance and maintenance. He has decided to take it back to Sydney.

Mr Smith put the ACT Government in a bind 10 months ago. Not to accept the gift might have been seen a churlish or a stupid waste. But having accepted it, the Government should have had put in place a cogent plan to use the helicopter quite quickly in rescue work. The issue was complicated by a review of aero-medical services in NSW with the result that NSW decided to put a second rescue helicopter in the air based in Canberra. That would cost about $1 million a year, of which the ACT would pay between $100,000 and $150,000. That is a much cheaper solution that accepting Mr Smith helicopter, refitting it and paying full running costs.
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There has been a welcome breakthrough in the past week for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Serbia handed over two critical witnesses to the slaughter of unarmed Muslims and the Croatian Government said Bosnian Croat militia general Tihomir Blaskic would turn himself in to the tribunal. The tribunal has now indicted 57 people: 46 Serbs, eight Croats and 3 Muslims. Alas, only two are in custody.

It is now 50 years since the Nuremberg war-crimes trial. Since then, despite all the war, killings and breaches of human rights, there has been very little accounting. And when there is any accounting it is usually in the form of national courts, or special courts to deal with specific conflicts.

The horrific events in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, however, seem at last to be pricking the consciences of world leaders, and the United Nations is closer to taking a step which should have been taken at its foundation … the establishment of a permanent international criminal court with its own criminal code. Such a court would have a general jurisdiction to deal with cases arising from any conflict past or future.
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The allegations that ultra-sound facilities have been used at Woden Valley Hospital to treat pet dogs have resulted in a justifiable sense of outrage among Canberrans, particularly those on hospital waiting lists.

Initially it seemed that only one case was involved … a case of an animal in suffering with no vet available. That might have been treated with leniency as a one-off lapse of judgment and taste made with good, if misguided, intentions. However, it appears that the practice runs to more than one case. If so it shows an unacceptable contempt for patients who are waiting to use the facilities.
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Before some Watson residents whip themselves up into too much hysteria over the finding of arsenic-contamination in the soil of suburban gardens, as they appeared to be doing at the weekend, they should consider several points. Arsenic is a naturally occurring substance and unless you eat quite a lot of soil, there is no danger to health; it does not even transmit to vegetables grown in contaminated soil. Last year the Legislative Assembly’s Planning and Environment Committee heard from two toxicologists that the health of residents living near former sheep dip sites had not suffered anything from abnormal levels of arsenic in the soil. None was found in urine tests and it is an easily testable substance. That position still holds.

One of the troubles is that in a pre-election climate the Government offered to buy the houses of several residents in Theodore for well over market values, and in at least one case the offer was accepted. That has unfortunately become the benchmark. It might have been better if the toxicologists had been brought in before the pay-outs.
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Victorians returned Premier Jeff Kennett and his Coalition Government resoundingly at the weekend. The result can be seen in many ways: approval for all or most of Mr Kennett’s policies; approval for his government’s style; disapproval of what the Opposition has to offer; fear by the electorate of a return to the days of the Cain and Kirner Governments.

Mr Kennett, of course, would like to put greater weight on the first two. But that is not tenable, especially as he made so much of the spectre of returning to the bad days of the Guilty Party.

None the less, Mr Kennett, can claim an endorsement of his tough economic policy. In the past three and a half years the Coalition has dug Victoria out of the economic hole left by the Kirner and Cain Labor Governments. Those Governments went on ill-disciplined spending and borrowing sprees that were exacerbated by the recession. Someone had to do some drastic work to rein in government spending and to restore the revenue base. The Coalition did it. Mr Kennett was fortunate in having the help of Alan Stockdale, his Treasurer. Mr Kennett has restored government finances and restored the economic capacity of the state, though much of the later would have happened with improved economic conditions anyway.
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The mayor of Manly, Sue Sacker, and other local government representatives in Sydney are right to oppose the ludicrous roll-out of overhead cable by Optus for pay-TV. Telstra-Foxtel can use Telstra underground conduit. The other reason for Optus’s roll-out, of course, is that Optus wants to build its own local telephone network and deliver data and other on-line services.

But there is no need, and never will be a need to have two sets of cables. Telstra fibre optic network coupled with coaxial from the street to the home is enough to carry a hundred or more television channels, plus voice and data … more than any human could possibly want or need.

The laying out of two cable networks is inefficient and inexcusable given other more pressing national needs.
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A letter has come in from Peter van Schaik joining the debate about bicycle helmets. Mr van Schaik has used statistics from the ACT Department of Health to show that since bicycle helmets have been made compulsory the number of injuries sustained by cyclists has gone up and the injured cyclists were staying longer in hospital.

He argues that helmets result in people riding faster or more recklessly because they have been lulled into a false sense of security.

At first blush it might seem that helmets give greater protection and therefore injuries should fall. But the world is more complex than that. An American academic, Gerald Wilde, lends support to Mr van Schaik. He has developed what he called Risk Homeostatis Theory.
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Gerald Wilde has an interesting theory. He thinks we are not dealing with injury and death on the road very well at all. At lot of official action to reduce the road toll is having no effect. And he has put forward a theory to explain what is happening.

the The weekend road toll made two paragraphs in The Canberra Times yesterday.

did not make the CT or SMH today, iother things did.