Crispin Hull

Officials of the Australian Rugby League may not like it, but the Brisbane and Canberra sides do have the cream of games talent and when they met at the weekend provided as good a spectacle as you are likely to get in the game.

It is a pity that the permutations of the finals series exclude the possibility that they might meet in the grand final.

Perhaps one of the reasons for their success, particularly Canberra’s, has been the geographic base of the teams. It has resulted in a concentrated and heavy following in their home towns.
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When the National Gallery of Australia, with the approval of the then Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, bought Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles for $1.3 million in 1973, the Philistines yelped. Twenty-two years later, even on the Philistines’ own measure … money … it has been a success. It is now worth $30 million … a far better investment than most money-management funds.

Of more importance, though, the possession of Blue Poles is proving to be an entree card for Australia. It has been requested by the New York Museum of Modern Art to be part of a career retrospective on Pollock next year and the Gallery is giving the request serious consideration. The Tate Gallery in London has also sought access.

It means, of course, that if we lend the painting, Australian requests to borrow masterpieces from New York and London will be given more favourable treatment. The purchase of the painting helps put Australia on the world’s art map.
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This week’s ding dong in the arts community has provided a splendid practical illustration of the effect of last year’s High Court’s decision on freedom of communication.

It means you in Readerland get a better idea of what’s going on in the world. The decision has come in for a lot of bucketing. Some _ including journalists, lawyers and the intelligent lay reader _ haven’t yet grasped the large practical difference the decision will make.

On Wednesday, Roger Woodward, an internationally renowned Australian pianist, got stuck into the Australia Council in a speech to the National Press Club. The Australia Council dishes out public money to artists.
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The Budget reveals a shift in grants to non-government community bodies and a greater empahsis on user pays.

Precisely which non-government grant recipients will lose and which will gain is not revealed. Under the let-the-managers-manage approach, it may be left to departments to deal with.

The losers are in the portfolios of arts and heritage (21 per cent or $1.2 million), government schools (38, $320,000), housing (17, $20,000) and conservation (2, $10,000).
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Pledge to live within three-year bottom line. Moving from $44m deficit this year to $21m surplus in three years.

ACTION: Subsidy down $6m. By third year down by $12m a year. Corporatised by July 1.

Payroll tax: Threshold rising to payroll of $800,000 by 1997. Business to benefit by $13.5m.

Tourism: $10m for promotion, including upgrade of information centre and new body called CanTrade.
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ACT residential leaseholders have more secure title to their land than freeholders in some states. Their title is as least as secure as freehold in other states. For practical purposes ACT residential leasehold is perpetual.

The reason is that under ACT law residential lessees have a right to renewal. That is granted by the ACT Land (Planning and Environment) Act (s172). It is subject to the payment of an administrative fee which must not be more than the administrative cost. It is subject also to the lease having less than 30 years to run. It is also subject to the Commonwealth or Territory not needing the land for a public purpose.

The grant of the right to renewal is a property right. It cannot be taken away without payment of just terms or compensation. The guarantee of just compensation lies in the ACT Acquisition Act, the Federal Self-Government Act and perhaps the Federal Constitution.
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I thought of writing to you when the woman in Grace Bros made her third attempt at getting the right box for the champagne glasses. Instead of taking the glasses to the room where the keep the empty boxes, she scurried back and forth selecting a box, unsuccessfully trying to pack the glasses in it, and going back for another try. Fred Hilmer, the oracle of efficiency would be interested in this, I thought. And as the glasses were for a prize for the squash raffle, I thought the IC might as well get a earful, too.

It was my turn to do the raffle … buy the prizes, sell the tickets on squash night, reimburse myself and hand over the profit to the treasurer.

Now you lot think you have turned over every stone in Australian society … culling inefficiency out of state government electricity generation; blowing the chill wind of competition through idle port authorities; rounding up slackness in government hospitals; sticking the needle into cosy lawyers’ and real-estate-agents’ monopolies; scything through unnecessarily detailed regulation … but you ain’t seen nothing as inefficient as raising 50 bucks in a raffle at ACT Masters Squash.
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ABOUT 10 pages in the middle of the S volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica in our school library were well-worn from much reading. When you closed the volume the tattered edges of those pages formed a thin brown line. The pages were, of course, the entries on sex. Teenagers will be teenagers. The librarian could hardly dismember (literally) the S volume after ruling that damaging books was a capital crime. Nor could he remove the whole volume, lest someone had an assignment on Scotland.

And that was before photocopiers would have made censorship attempts even more hopeless. Nowadays we not only have copiers, but the Net. There has been a fair amount of fear and loathing recently that teenagers will use the Net to get all sorts of smut. And the usual range of vote-trawling, knee-jerking politicians have demanded it stop.
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A gathering in Melbourne at the weekend gave tribute to Sir Anthony Mason’s eight years as Chief Justice of the High Court.

Mason and the majority of judges who have sided with him have come under a lot of public criticism, mainly from conservatives. They have accused the court of “”radical”, “”dangerously activist” things … like imply into the Constitution rights to freedom of speech; extract a principle of native title seemingly from thin air; require a right to legal representation; abolish centuries-old principles of property law; wipe out nine decade of Australian jurisprudence on free trade; and allow foreign treaties to govern Australian life. Tut, tut.

The detail may be new, but the broad approach is not. It is what much of the judiciary has done for a lot of the time. The approach has a long pedigree.
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