Crispin Hull

They are a delicate balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces. The central government keeps wanting more control and the parts keep wanting more autonomy.

Some parts are forced into a federation. Some of the parts join the federation to get security and economies of scale. Some feel regional differences are too great and prefer to keep full sovereignty or having joined a federation want to break away. It is often a balance between feeling and thinking.

Quebec is not a lone example. This week’s vote changes nothing. It is still more captive of centrifugal rather than centripetal forces. What can be done to get these forces back into balance?
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Native title is a fragile thing. It was made that much more fragile by a ruling by the Full Federal Court yesterday. The ruling will make native title claims on vast areas of Australia … those which have been or are under pastoral leases … much more difficult.

But miners and pastoralists should not start cheering immediately. The court painted a restrictive, administrative role for the Native Title Tribunal. If Aboriginal claimants do not like its processes at any time, they can still go to court to seek declarations of their title.

This was the very spectre of expensive, delay-causing court actions done parcel-by-parcel that dismayed pastoralists and miners after the original Mabo decision came down. It led at least some of them to support Paul Keating’s Native Title Bill in the hope that endless litigation could be avoided. Yesterday’s decision, on that count, will give them no joy.
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Few would have seriously expected the Chinese appeal court to do anything other than confirm both the conviction and sentence of Australian businessman James Peng. The only hope now is that Chinese authorities will have a change of heart and deport him, rather than make him serve the 18 year sentence, as they did earlier this year in the case of Harry Wu, the American human-rights campaigner.

Unfortunately, for Mr Peng his case is very different. Mr Peng appears to have incurred the personal ire of some people close to the Chinese leadership for out-smarting them in business matters. Mr Wu, on the other hand, was an idealist who upset the leadership in a general political way, not in a personal business way. Further, Mr Wu could draw on much greater clout from his home country.
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Health centres have provided good service to the people of Canberra since the first such centres in Australia were set up 20 years ago. There is great merit in having a range of health services under one roof: GP, counselling, nutrition, immunisations and so on. However, health centres cannot succeed without the presence of at least one GP. If the GPs disappear, the health centres will inevitably follow.

The question arises, though, who is to pay for the presence of a GP? The ACT Government made a decision earlier this year that it was not a good use of ACT taxpayers money to provide salaries for doctors at health centres when there were other ways of providing a similar service, principally by cost-shifting to the Commonwealth. The ACT decided that it would cease paying salaries and negotiate with doctors to take over the health-centre practices as private practitioners. All pensioners and other benefit recipients would still pay nothing because they would come under the Commonwealth’s Medicare bulk-billing arrangements. Some other disadvantaged patients would also pay nothing if the doctor saw fit. Others would pay at least something per visit, unless the doctors decided to totally bulk-bill, but that would be unlikely as the trend is against this in Canberra.
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The two major parties are in a policy gridlock. And they have each allowed the other to put them in that position. The gridlock arises out of silly scare tactics each party plays with the slightest policy utterance from any member of the other party. Any utterance is pounced upon, spun into a fearsome exaggeration and pushed before voters in the hope of electoral advantage.

To date both parties have backed each other into corners on aged pensions, tax, Medicare and industrial relations, to name a few. It seems as if neither party is able to offer anything in the way of policies that will rein in public spending that would be for the general public good, for fear of upsetting a pressure group that might result in loss of votes.
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The secretary of the ACTU, Bill Kelty, is quite right to assert that the battle at Comalco’s Weipa bauxite mine is a fundamental one. But the battle is not one between unionism in general and capital, but one between a particular form of unionism, as practised and preached by the ACTU.

That form of unionism is one of the closed shop and one of equal pay for equal categories of work across whole industries. It is not the form of unionism where those people who want to join a union can do so and where a union negotiates pay and conditions with individual employers.

At Comalco 600 individuals have forsaken the union and taken up individual contracts which have given workers substantial pay increases that the union could not get them. About 50 workers stayed with the union and are on much lower pay.
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The decision of the Commonwealth to suspend Nigeria for two years with a threat of expulsion unless it returns to democratic rule and good governance within two years sends a clear message to the world that breaches of human rights are matters of international concern. The assertion by Nigerian leaders that the execution of nine political dissenters, including noted writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, was an internal matter is a shallow one.

The Commonwealth’s lead should result in other countries expressing their outrage and also to put economic and other pressure on the Nigerian military to hand over to civilian rule. It should also put paid to arguments that the Commonwealth’s earlier concern for human rights in South Africa was monochromatic … that if whites engaged in racism and breaches of human rights, the Commonwealth would bristle with moral indignation, but similar acts by black rulers would be ignored.
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The proposal by Independent MLA Paul Osborne for majority jury verdicts should not be taken on lightly. Mr Osborne says he is not seeking more convictions, but only wants to overcome situations where one or two “”obstreperous” individuals can result in no verdict being reached and millions of dollars spent on trials being wasted.

Mr Osborne offered alternatives of an 11:1 verdict or a 10:2 verdict. Whatever logic there is in countering the obstreperous juror, it can surely only run to one, not two. Mr Osborne cited the Bjelke-Petersen case in which a staunch political ally of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen somehow found himself on the jury and refused to convict, no matter what the evidence. It indicates that there may be a case for an 11:1 verdict to counteract a lone juror who will not convict no matter what the evidence. However, this justification is based n the presumption that there is one juror behaving beyond the ordinary bounds of reason. That may happen in some isolated cases. But the chance that there are two rogue jurors on the same jury is so remote as to be discounted. It is more likely that if two jurors are holding out against the other 10, at least one of them is doing so for good reason. In these cases, the defendant should have the benefit of the doubt. There is no logic or sense in permitting 10:2 verdicts.
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The constitutional time-bomb continues to tick. Section 53 of the Constitution provides: “”The Senate may not amend proposed laws imposing taxation, or proposed laws appropriating revenue or moneys for the ordinary annual services of the Government. . . . Except as provided by this section, the Senate shall have equal power with the House of Representatives.”

The Founding Fathers may have intended that the words “”shall not amend” also meant “”shall not reject”. That interpretation carries some logic. After all, if a law prevents you from damaging something, there is a fair presumption that it also prevents you from destroying it. However, that logic is not accepted as the legal view and it is now accepted that the Constitution does permit the Senate to block the Government’s money supply, starving it of the wherewithal to govern and putting pressure on a head of state … whether President or Governor-General … to intervene.
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The ALP’s threat to block Supply in the ACT has been quite wrongly associated with the Federal Coalition’s blocking of Supply 20 years ago that led to the dismissal of the Whitlam Government.

The ACT ALP has been accused of political hypocrisy for on one hand maintaining its rage against the actions of the Coalition and the Governor-General and yet on the week of the 20th anniversary of that event threatening to block Supply itself. It is a misconceived accusation. The events are entirely different. The essential difference is that the ACT has only one House of Parliament, so the ACT ALP’s threat takes on a different character. It is constitutionally quite proper, under present arrangements, for an Opposition in the representative chamber to block any legislation, including a Budget.
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