Crispin Hull

The ACT has apparently become the favourite shop of the forum shoppers who want to engage in surrogate motherhood. At least one woman is pregnant with another couple’s child, apparently ready to surrender it after the birth.

But the law is not in keeping with technology or morality.

ACT law makes it a criminal offence to engage in commercial surrogacy … where the receiving parents pay the surrogate mother. But it does not make it a criminal offence to engage in altruistic surrogacy … where only reasonable expenses are paid. That has resulted in people thinking that it is open-go for altruistic surrogacy. Not so. There are quite a few hurdles and the law makes it clear that surrogacy is a Bad Thing, even if it does not make it criminal.

There are half a dozen hurdles.

Altruistic surrogacy agreements are void. This means that a woman can bear the child and keep all the living and medical expenses provided by the receiving parents and then renege, keeping the child. The receiving parents have no recourse. They do their dough. Conversely, the receiving parents can walk away, and the surrogate mother is left, literally, holding the baby. Moreover, there is an irrebuttable presumption of law, in every state and territory, that she is the mother and she carries the duties that flow from it.
Continue reading “1996_03_march_column12mar”

In his retirement, Paul Keating might like to reassess exactly what “”unrepresentative swill” is in the Australian electoral scene.

Keating referred to the Senate as “”unrepresentative swill”, a phrase he must have picked up when he owned the piggery. But Saturday’s election shows that he was wrong. The tables show the picture.

In the House of Representatives the Coalition got 46.7 per cent of the vote and was rewarded with 67 per cent of the seats. Surely, 20 percentage points of those seats are “”unrepresentative swill” … about 30 MPs’ worth of unrepresentative swill.

In the Senate, however, the Coalition got 50 per cent of the vote (49.97 to be precise) and exactly 50 per cent of the seats contested … no left over unrepresentative swill.
Continue reading “1996_03_march_column05mar”

John Howard should beware of magpie clauses.

Magpies, you may recall, awakened one Ewart Smith, former deputy secretary in the Attorney-General’s Department very early one September morn in 1987. In his insomnia he realised a way to defeat the Australia Card.

It was after the double dissolution of that year. The Australia Card Bill had been knocked back by the Senate twice and Bob Hawke had used that as a trigger to call a double dissolution at which the House and all the Senate were sent to election. Hawke won the House but not the Senate. In the ordinary course of events there would have been a joint sitting at which Hawke would have had the numbers to pass the Bill because his excess in the House would have more than compensated for his deficit in the Senate. This is how Gough Whitlam got six Bills through after the 1974 double dissolution after he did not get a Senate majority.
Continue reading “1996_03_march_anal”

The ACT Labor Party did the wise thing to replace Rosemary Follett with Andrew Whitecross, according to the results of the latest Canberra Times-Datacol opinion poll.

The poll was taken before the Federal election last week, when Ms Follett was Leader of the Opposition. It showed that Chief Minister Kate Carnell was the preferred Chief Minister by 48 per cent against 38 per cent who preferred Ms Follett.

The poll shows, however, that the Labor Party has a big task ahead to dent Ms Carnell’s popularity. Voters were asked to rate key ACT politicians from very bad, bad, middling, good to very good. Ms Carnell topped the poll with an average of 2.86. She easily had the highest very good rating (11). The independents came next with Paul Osborne on 2.80 and Michael Moore on 2.70. Urban Services Minister Tony De Domenico came last of those rated at 2.19.
Continue reading “1996_03_march_actpoll”

Women are getting a raw deal this election.

Extraction of electoral data shows that on the Labor side women get pushed to the marginals while men get the safe seats. This is true of both challenging and sitting candidates.

This is despite Labor’s professed aim of equality in representation.

Labor is contesting all 148 seats.

Nine very safe Labor seats became available when the retiring member did not stand or through redistribution. All have margins of more than 8 per cent and are dead certainties for the Labor candidate to become an MP. Men got all of them.
Continue reading “1996_02_february_women”

THE Senate voting system is likely to come under constitutional challenge and if successful it will favour the Coalition and the Greens.

Under Senate voting rules, voters can do one of two things: tick a party box above the line, or go below the line and number every candidate individually in order. If you vote above the line for a party, your vote is deemed to follow the preferences according to a ticket lodged before the election by the various political parties.

But above-the-line voting may offend the Constitution which requires that MPs be “”directly chosen by the people”. The argument is that if you let the party do the choosing, the MPs are not “”directly chosen by the people”.
Continue reading “1996_02_february_ticket”

Prime Minister Paul Keating has blown the chance of recouping $800 million into the public purse by his election campaign announcement about tax fraud, according to senior Tax Office sources.

The sources suggest that Mr Keating abandoned the standard way of dealing with tax avoidance for political advantage.

They likened it to announcing in February that you have found a warehouse full of stolen goods and that you would be raiding the warehouse sometime after March 2. Of course, the goods will be gone.

Mr Keating announced on February 11 that about $800 million in tax a year was being avoided through complex trusts, and that this money would now be available for election promises. He said that he had only been given the advice about the extent of avoidance in January.
Continue reading “1996_02_february_taxdodge”

Forty of the 76 Senate seats are up for election. That is six in each state and two each in the Northern Territory and the ACT.

In the territories, one Labor and one Coalition senate are invariably elected in each territory.

It is very unlikely that either major party will get a majority.

The table shows the overall position.

The 36 senators up for election in the states were elected for a six-year term in 1990. The 36 elected in 1993 stay put to serve the remainder of their six-year term. The short senators up for re-election are shown state-by-state and with party affiliation in the bottom table.
Continue reading “1996_02_february_senguide”

Labor will lose government if it loses seven seats to the Coalition.

Because of the redistribution some Labor-held seats are notionally Coalition and vice versa. But there is disagreement at the precise effect of the redistribution so experts disagree on the figure of seven. Some put it at nine.

In any event, swings are invariably uneven. The following are a list of seats to watch, either because they are marginals or have some other interesting element. The south-eastern states are dealt with first because time zones mean their results will go up first on election night.
Continue reading “1996_02_february_seats”

By the look of two judgments this week, it appears the calicivirus has attacked the implied-rights rabbit that the High Court pulled out of the hat in 1992 and 1994.

In 1992 the High Court struck out the detestable federal law banning political advertisements on radio and TV. It suggested there was an implied right in the Constitution for political communication. This right arose out of the Constitutional provision that the House of Representatives and Senate must be “”directly chosen” by the people. People had to make an informed choice for the constitutional provision to work and they could not make an informed choice if federal legislation prohibited people from broadcasting political advertising.

Where would it end?

In 1994 the court used the implication to strike out some of the more onerous elements of state defamation laws. It meant, for example, newspapers could publish letters from voters getting stuck into politicians without carrying the burden of proving the truth of every imputation that could be extracted from the letter.
Continue reading “1996_02_february_rights”