Crispin Hull

The people of Canberra have shown a stubborn liking for glass milk bottles. It is hard to tell whether that is because of a belief that glass containers are more environmentally friendly or whether they think the milk tastes better from taste-neutral glass than from waxed cardboard cartons.

In any event, the Act Milk Authority should not be allowed to get away with eliminating the glass option by stealth or what it thinks is benign neglect. It would be all to easy for the authority to use the excuse of the current worn bottle-washing equipment to phase out glass bottles. The worn bottle-washing equipment is increasing the risk of glass particles falling in bottles. The authority says there is a health risk and in that circumstance distribution should cease till the problem is fixed.
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Last year the High Court ruled in favour of freedom of political communication. In effect, it means no more easy defamation politicians. It removed one of the greatest impediments to reform of defamation law … the self-interest of politicians who had most to gain from a restrictive law. Their conduct was less open to comment and they could pick up defamation damages.

Politicians are now more likely to think, that if it is good enough for us to be subject to a free-speech regime, it is good enough for everyone else.

So reform is now more likely, but it must be the right sort of reform. Last week, the NSW Law Reform Commission reported. It recommended that the onus of proof which presently falls on publishers to prove the truth of what they publish be reversed. It would mean plaintiffs would have to prove the falsity of the publication. This has problems.
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The wording of the Constitution and the war enabled the Feds to take away income tax from the states and we are now suffering the consequences. It means the states have to go cap in hand to Feds to get tax money they should have raised themselves and each can blame each other when voters whinge about high taxes or low services. Further the Federal Government has built up a large duplicate bureaucracy to ensure its money (which is really the states money being reimbursed) is properly spent.

Last week the federal Coalition said it was going to do something about it. Prime Minister Paul Keating immediately said it meant state income taxes and … shock, horror … a state GST. As if the state petrol, tobacco and booze taxes were not a GST anyway. Besides, broadening state consumption taxes would run into constitutional strife because Section 90 gives the Commonwealth the exclusive right to levy excise taxes (in layperson’s language this means sales taxes). The High Court has only tolerated booze, smokes and petrol taxes as historic accidents.
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One of the bad practices of Tudor monarchs in the 16th century is to be repeated in the Albert Hall next week. The Tudors used to replenish their coffers every now and then by selling monopoly rights to engage in certain trades. Sometimes they would just give the monopoly rights to mates. It caused great agitation among the good traders of England, but to defy it could result in fines, imprisonment or death.

It was only with the arrival of the Stuarts that the traders and Parliament were powerful enough to get the Crown’s rights restricted with the passing of the Statute of Monopolies in 1623, which restricted monopolies to inventions, and even then only for about 15 years.

Since then, Crown monopolies have re-emerged in a different form … the licence. Parliament has allowed the Executive to licence some activities to the exclusion of other practitioners for a hefty fee.
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Plants have resisted attacks by animals to eat them in various ways. Most notably, they have grown thorns or thrown off toxic chemicals. It has taken millions of years through the processes of natural selection. But plants, like animals are still organic. They cannot produce chemicals of such toxicity that in killing animals they kill themselves. Thus they sometimes produce chemicals that will merely scare some animals off. Various chillies contains chemicals that result in sensible animals (non-Mexicans) not coming back for a second bite. Marijuana plants, poppies and the coca plant contain chemicals that cause animals that eat them some cause for not returning.

Some of the chemicals have different effects in different animals … poisonous to one, beneficial to another, toxic to tumour cells benign to other cells, inducing addictive euphoria in one species and having no effect on another.

They are there. They are part of the biological struggle between species on earth. It is difficult to see how they can ever be eradicated.
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There are statistics on victims of crime, reported crime and punished crime but no statistics on crime itself. This is _ obviously _ because a lot of crime goes unreported. As a result, people use statistics on reported crime and punished crime (convictions) as a substitute. It may seem reasonable, but it is not.

We know, for example, despite a surge in reports of sexual assault, that the underlying rate has not fluctuated much. General surveys of the population about whether people had been a victim of a crime indicate that. It is just that changes of attitude in police forces, the courts and society in general make reporting a less traumatic experience, so more victims are willing to report. Contrarily, as insurance companies lifted their excess, reportage of theft and malicious damage fell, but the underlying rate probably remained the same. In short, reporting figures are rubbery. Now it seems that conviction figures can also be as misrepresentative.
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In December last year The Canberra Times published an article by me expressing concern about the Merit Protection Review Agency’s investigation at the Australian War Memorial.

Essentially, that article said there was something irregular about the way the process was put in train. The minister in charge of the public service, Gary Johns, launched it without the knowledge of the Minister in charge of the memorial, Con Sciacca. It said the agency, normally a body that defends public servants subject of disciplinary procedures, was now put in a prosecutorial role to investigate harassment, but without the normal safeguards of fairness that prosecutors normally apply.

In short, the article said the process was flawed and had delivered an injustice to the director and deputy director of the memorial.
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Mad as he is, there was a cool logic in the demand by the Unabomber to have his 35,000-word manifesto in The Washington Post and the New York Times .

It has been described as a diatribe against industrial society. It is now available on the Internet. The Unabomber … as the FBI have named him … could have put it on the Internet himself and made it available to 30 million people, but it might have led to his discovery. Even so, it would not have been as satisfactory as getting it in The Washington Post and The New York Times. This is because there is a stamp of authority about these papers.

That authority in this instance was somewhat diluted by the fact that the papers were under some duress to publish. The Unabomber has killed half a dozen people … mostly scientists and industrialists with elaborate home-made bombs in the past decade. The duress arose because the Unabomber had agreed to stop his bombing campaign against people (but not property) if they did publish and continue it if they did not. None the less, the papers could still have refused.
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The Leader of the Opposition, Michael Moore, has picked the key political weakness in the Budget … some fudging with education figures. He has played on it on the air waves and in the press. He will extract the maximum political advantage out of it so that come next election he will be able to tell a key component of his constituency that he delivered.

Like Lloyd George he is a leader without a party. Sorry, did I write “”Leader of the Opposition, Michael Moore”? I meant, of course, to write Independent Michael Moore. How did I make such a silly mistake?

On ABC Radio this morning, when backbenchers were each given a two-minute free kick, there were no Labor Members. A Green talked about vivisection (more interested in animal cuts than Budget cuts) and Paul Osborne … need I tell you … congratulated the two footfall teams on their heroic failures last weekend. Neither can be treated seriously.
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