Crispin Hull

The Opposition has promised to give some tax relief on interest earned on savings. The details are unclear, but Opposition Leader John Howard said it would involve a tax break of about 25 per cent and would be means-tested. He was immediately attacked by the Government which said it would cost at least $1 billion a year.

Tax was neutralised early in the campaign by both major parties. The Coalition said there would be no new taxes and Labor said the total tax take would stay the same. After that tax has only featured as an issue briefly, when Prime Minister Paul Keating asserted the Government would be able to find an extra $800 million by chasing the very rich for tax they had avoided through complex trusts. This was met with justified scepticism. And without a concurrent announcement of retrospective remedial action the avoiders were warned and could move their money.

In short, both parties have only sniffed at the edges of what should have been a fundamental issue. The tax system needs significant change. The relief on interest is but a small step in the right direction. To date, saving money in the bank has been a mug’s game. After allowing for the tax on interest and inflation, you go backwards.
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And the winner of the Republican primary in New Hampshire is . . . Bill Clinton. Well, at least tentatively. In fact, is was won by Pat Buchanan the populist columnist and favourite of the Christian Right. Mr Buchanan has delivered a blow to the chances of the previous front-runner, Senate majority leader Bob Dole.

New Hampshire does not deliver many votes at the convention later in the year to select the Republican candidate, but because it is the first state popular-vote primary it carries some great advantages in money, momentum and psychological advantage.

All this is good news to Bill Clinton because while Mr Buchanan’s extremism and creationism may make him popular among the far right and in some pockets of the Republic Party, it will not endear him to the population at large.
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THE RULING by the High Court yesterday on the Western Australian electoral system and the Langer case show the role of implied rights in the Constitution to be more restricted than first thought.

The court ruled that implied rights did not mean that electorates for the Western Australian Parliament must have roughly equal numbers; they could be vastly different, as they are.

There was no implied right of one vote, one value. In the Langer case it ruled that provisions of the Electoral Act making it an offence to encourage people to vote in a prima-facie informal way were valid.
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The announcement by Prime Minister Paul Keating earlier in the campaign that $800 million from tax dodgers could be recouped for the public purse appears to have been a self-denying prophesy. Once announced, the tax dodgers apparently have immediately begun to remove their money, rearrange their affairs, and started the task of creating new tax dodges.

Mr Keating’s announcement caused considerable ire among people in the Tax Office who had done a large amount of work towards trapping the dodgers only to see it wasted by his premature and public announcement. Some tax officials likened it to announcing this month that you had found a warehouse of stolen goods and that you would raid it in a month’s time. Not very bright from a tax-enforcer’s view, but if you need to pretend you have $800 million in the kitty very necessary.
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The sentence of two-and-a-half months’ jail imposed upon political activist Albert Langer shows the law and the Electoral Commission are asses. The sentence will give Mr Langer some satisfaction in showing the law is an ass.

Mr Langer was jailed for defying a February Victorian Supreme Court injunction barring him from distributing pamphlets urging voters not to allocate preferences to the major parties. The jail term was imposed after Mr Langer told the judge: “”The only way you can constrain me is to lock me up.” The judge fell for it and made Mr Langer a martyr and the commission a fool.

Justice Barry Beach, who ordered the injunction after a complaint from the commission, said Langer’s defiance was a blatant contempt of court. Immediately after the injunction was issued, held a news conference and handed out more leaflets.
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One of the main reasons for the IRA’s success … if maiming, killing and property destruction can be described as such … has been its organisation into very small cells. It has meant that captured IRA suspects were incapable of giving too much away because they knew so little and knew so few people up the chain of command. It countered the potential for losing control that such a system had by a rigid discipline code, meting out knee-capping or death to those who misbehaved. British intelligence estimated that in the 25 years of violence in Northern Ireland and the mainland, perhaps as few as 200 IRA operatives at any one time were responsible for all the death and destruction … and average of two deaths a week and untold millions in economic damage.

The Royal Ulster Constabulary started to make inroads into the IRA in the mid-1980s, extracting the so-called super-grasses who had had enough and traded information and evidence for immunity. But it only partially stopped the IRA. The cessation of violence only came when the IRA agreed to it 17 months ago. That agreement was presented by what has been called the IRA’s political wing, the Sinn Fein. Throughout the 17 months, the British and Irish Governments and the unionist and moderate Catholic parties in Northern Ireland imagined that when Sinn Fein spoke, the IRA was speaking; that Gerry Adams was speaking for the IRA.
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The United States and Taiwan should behave with much more caution towards China. They are too complacent about the likelihood of China attacking Taiwan. For more than 40 years, mainland China has tolerated a situation under which it has had no control over Taiwan or the people who live there, largely because a fiction has been maintained that there is one China and that Taiwan is a mere rebellious province of it. The importance of maintaining that fiction should not be under-estimated.

For more than two decades, mainland China preferred isolation to recognition of Taiwan, demanding that nation recognise only one China. Eventually, its patient insistence paid off as nation after nation abandoned Taiwan in favour of the government in Beijing. The leaders in Beijing think that one day China will be reunified and that Taiwan will once again be part of a single China. It may seem fanciful or naive, but it is the reality of their thinking and the US and Taiwan must take it into consideration in their actions. They will not forsake easily what they see as the gains of 40 years.

At present the government in Taipei at least formally holds the position that one day there will be a unified China. This is a ground for not recognising Taiwan as an independent nation when otherwise general principles of international law would demand it. However, this may change after March 23 when Taiwan holds its first democratic presidential elections. The legitimacy engendered by the election may make it a prelude to dropping the pretence that there can be one China and a formal declaration of independence.
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It is extremely unfortunate that changes to Medicare are being proposed in the climate of the election-campaign auction. Labor has offered cash rebates to people for various medical services not covered by Medicare, but they are restricted to services to children and are means tested. Labor will also build a medical school in north Queensland. The total cost is about $368 million a year. Miraculously, Prime Minister Paul Keating has promised no increase in the Medicare levy. But Labor has made and broken that promise twice before.

The Coalition is yet to present its health policy.

While it is important for the major parties to put forward policies at election time, the complexities of health delivery require more than a grubby auction. This week’s cash-in-hand promise is little more than a bribe. And public expenditure is not a magic pudding. Slices of spending cannot be continuously extracted and the pudding revert to a whole pudding again by magic.
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The United Nations is in strife. The idealism may well still there; but the realism is not. The UN will have no more cash left on December 31 and will be $A560 million in debt.

Members states are asking the United Nations to pay out and spend more than it is taking in yet those very members are not paying their dues. Only 25 states have paid up for 1996 on time, leaving 160 states in arrears. They total $A4.4 billion. The biggest debtor, the United States, owes $A1.6 billion. The US pays about a quarter of the UN’s finances.

The mood in the US Congress has been hostile the UN for quite some time. US members of Congress have objected to UN resolutions that ran counter to US foreign policy and have objected to what they see as waste at the UN headquarters in New York. But they have failed to balance that against the UN’s good works. Nor have they balanced the UN record’s against the US’s own fairly pitiful record as policeman of the world.
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Wayne Goss has been forced to see sense. Faced with the likelihood of an electoral backlash, he has backed away from asking the Governor, Leneen Forde, for a general election in the face of Labor’s loss of the pivotal seat of Mundingburra in the by-election at the weekend.

Having lost the seat, Labor has 44 seats, the Coalition 44 and there is one pro-Coalition Independent, Liz Cunningham. In short, Labor has lost its majority. Mr Goss faced two obstacles if he wanted to cling to power. The first was the good sense of the Governor who could easily have refused a request for a general election, given that there had been one such a short time ago and that the by-election was just a formalising or finishing off of that process. The second was that the electorate would have seen through the ploy and voted against Labor even more heavily, leaving Labor in even more difficult circumstances at the next election.

None the less, Mr Goss is determined to hang on to some power. He wants to retain the Labor Party leadership, even if that inevitably means as Leader of the Opposition. He has pre-empted opponents within his parliamentary party by calling a meeting of his parliamentary party for tomorrow (THURS) at which he will declare the leadership vacant and recontest it himself. This gives very little time for others, in particular Health Minister Peter Beattie, to shore up their votes. It also means that MPs will be voting during a hiatus, while still technically in government but on the verge of a no-confidence motion. It smacks of trickery.
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