Crispin Hull

The results of the current round of wage negotiations between the ACT Government and its employees must break earlier patterns. Two elements of the unions’ demands should not be acceptable to the Government or the taxpayers of the ACT. The first is that they have claimed a 9 per cent rise, which is about 4.5 per cent above inflation. The second is that they have made an across-the-service claim.

Gone are the days when unions could put their hands out for more money without offering better value work and then launch a program of blackmail and disruption till they get it. Governments should resist this approach. Pay rises should not be automatic, but should be earned. That means greater productivity or greater efficiency through more flexible working arrangements. Clearly, those cannot be made across the whole service. Some workers will be more willing or more able to offer more than others.
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It is sad that in making comments about whether Australia should go to Sri Lanka for its opening World Cup cricket game there was so little emphasis on or indeed empathy with the people of Sri Lanka whose lives have been so profoundly affected by the on-going violence in the country. Some of the media emphasis, too, has been misdirected. The approach was that a precious cricket game was being so inconveniently disrupted. The fact that more than 70 people died in the bomb blast last week in Colombo got an incidental second place. It was as if the recent Sri Lankan cricket tour counted for nothing in terms of generating ties between nations and people. The visiting team may as well have been robots.

The Sri Lankan Government has accused the Tamil Tigers of the attack on the Central Bank, but the Tigers have not claimed responsibility. The attack marks a further turn in the 14-year war for independence for the Tamil area in the north and east of Sri Lanka which has claimed 50,000 lives. Last year the Government took the rebel stronghold of Jaffna. About 500 government troops and 2000 rebels died in the 50-day battle.
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The new Premier of Quebec, Lucien Bouchard, wants a re-run or last year’s referendum of whether Quebec should separate from the rest of Canada. In that referendum, Quebec can within a trifling 50,000 votes (less than 1 per cent) of deciding to separate. Mr Bouchard, the new leader of the Quebec separatist party which has a majority in the Quebec provincial parliament, argues that Canada is “”two profoundly different nations who shortly must decide upon their destiny”.

He said the best solution for Quebec would be to have sovereignty and be in partnership with Canada, presumably with some sort of free-trade and defence arrangement. To some extent he is right. There will never be rest until Quebec has some sort of sovereignty that satisfies the French-speaking part of Quebec.
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The leader of the Australian Democrats, Cheryl Kernot, made some sound points in her party’s charter to reform government processes and improve public access to information.

Senator Kernot has rightly called for an independent parliamentary budget office to do its own fiscal analyses. The public would no longer have to rely on the executive to get information about what the executive is doing with the money. It is true that Labor has improved some of the standards of budgetary performance, in particular creating forward estimates. But it has still been guilty of fudging the figures, making its performance appear better than it really is. The value of an independent information provider is well exemplified in the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which is created by a statute that guarantees its independence.

Other elements in Senator Kernot’s charter include: steps against jobs for the boys, truth in electoral advertising, a parliamentary commissioner to deal with MPs’ standards, parliamentary approval for treaties, more independence for the Speaker and Senate President, fixed terms for Parliament and cutting the Senate’s power to reject supply.
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The recent rulings of the Tax Office on child care which came to light this week demand the immediate attention of whichever party forms government after March 2.

A lot of the complexities of the tax law have grown up in the past two decades because of the incessant game played between government and business over maximising and minimising the tax. Every trick played by business and every loophlole exploited results in complex legislation to overcome them. The complex and detailed fringe benefits and capital gains taxes are good examples of governmental responses to business and highly paid employees overcoming income tax.

While the tax game centres around company cars, obscure off-shore trusts, deferred dividends and the like, one can bemoan the inefficiency of it, but essentially business (collectively) has brought a lot of it one its own head. However, when one is dealing with imposing fringe-benefits tax on some child-care provided by employers (even as salary sacrifice), the argument takes on a different character.
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It must be a frustrating time for scientists and pure mathematicians. They, like the rest of us, will be bombarded with election material for the next five weeks. But they will, perhaps, be more anguished by it. They will have to listen to the nation’s leaders utterly focused on a time scale of five short weeks. They will hear extravagant promises. They will hear about money being dealt out for the peripheral and ephemeral. It will be money for programs for bureaucrats and consultants to listen and report. They will hear of the budgetary deficit and the current account deficit, of interest rates and the lack of savings and investment. They will hear of glib solutions and vote-catching slogans. They will hear of artificial training programs to keep young people off the official dole queue.

But they will hear nothing of Australia’s scientific, research and engineering base. They will hear nothing of Australia’s fragile place in the world’s scientific and research community. None of these critical matters will sound in a vote in five weeks, so who cares? What does it matter what happens five or ten years away when one can be thrown out of political office in five weeks?

Yet Australian science and research is at a crucial point. If our total research effort, whether government or privately funded, falls below a critical mass, Australian scientists will get shut out of a lot of the international intercourse in science and research. If we do not contribute significant research, international science will ignore us. We will not be pulling our weight. At present our percentage contribution to world research … somewhere between 1 and 2 per cent in most significant fields … earns us an international place. It means we get far more than we put in.
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John Howard’s policy of matching Labor’s bribe and don’t frighten the horses on Medicare may neutralise health as an election issue, but it will surely fail as a long-term solution to Australia’s health problems.

It fails to understand Medicare’s weaknesses and therefore fails to do anything about them. And without those weaknesses being fixed, Medicare fundamental strength will be eroded.

The strength of Medicare is its universality and its safety-net security. Howard got it right in acknowledging that. He joins about 90 per cent of Australians and even 68 per cent of doctors who approve of Medicare.
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What a shame the great debate went out on CNN so the whole world (or at least the 0.0001 per cent of it that watches CNN) could see one of the worst examples of public-affairs television in Australia’s recent history.

Ray Martin should never have been allowed to chair the debate. He is a pleasant, good-looking entertainer; not a current-affairs journalist. Midday and 60-Minutes shows are precisely that … shows. They entertain people for ratings and advertising.

On Sunday night, Martin put on a 60-Minutes performance, but without the slick editing. Like 60-Minutes, much of it was stolen from America.
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The task of keeping the bastards honest is becoming easier.

Well, perhaps it is impossible to keep the bastards honest, but at least the task of pulling them up for dishonesty, inconsistency and broken promises is getting easier. We no longer have to rely on the Democrats or memory. Electronic databases are making it far easier for journalists and political opponents to drag up precisely what was said in the past.

The electronic versions of Hansard and newspapers are especially valuable in dragging out what was said in the past to see if what is being said now or done now is consistent.
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