Crispin Hull

There seems little point in an inquiry in whether the shop doors should be closed now the issue has well and truly bolted. Shops all pover the ACT have been selling the full range of goods and services at all hours for years. This is despite the fact it is against the law … a law that came into force in the 1960s with a 1960s maximum penalty of $200.

That law restricts the sorts of goods that can be sold outside six to six Monday to Thursday, six to nine on Friday and nine to noon Saturday. Nineteen categories of items can be sold outside hours, inclusing food, hardware and motoring items. But department stores and others routinely sell everything outside hours. The ACT community is clearly not suffering as a result of these breaches of the law. To the contrary people appear to enjoy full-range shopping over more hours.

What will an inquiry achieve? A number of groups with selfish interests will propose tightening up which will lessen competition and reduce choice of hours for consumers.
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The Commonwealth Bank should be suitably chastised by its retreat on increased banks fees. The rudeness of the rises was compounded by the cheek of the timing _ just after the Prices Surveillance Authority had handed in its report.

The Government has been quite right to hold the sword of regulation over the heads of the banks if they do not behave with some social conscience over small account-holders.

Economic rationalists and free marketeers have argued that the banks have a right to charge so that each service is fully paid for by customers. That may be a reasonable argument if banking in Australia was solely driven by market forces like, say, confectionery or used cars. It is not. The Federal Government gives an unwritten guarantee that none of the big five banks will go under.
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The state of the Australian National Line neatly illustrates several of the worse aspects of policy and administration by this Federal Government: failure to stand up to union power; paying Labor mates large amounts of money for consultancies; selling the national silver to meet profligate recurrent spending; dithering and postponing hard decisions if it faces any public backlash.

Having for years not stood up to the Australian Maritime Union, the Government has allowed ANL to become hopelessly uneconomic. It could hardly give it away. It then appointed former NSW Premier Neville Wran for a fee running to hundreds of thousands of dollars to work out what to do. It has now postponed any decision on whether to sell ANL because it fears maritime unions will strike, sending export and import industries into chaos and causing public disquiet a short time before an election.
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Government is not a business; if it were there would be no need for it. It is important for government not to be profligate, to run efficiently and to be innovative, but there is a broader public interest which overrides all that the public service does which of its nature results in “”inefficiencies” that the private sector would not tolerate. That public interest is hard to define, but it includes things like fairness, equity and diligent accounting for public funds.

The new head of the ACT Public Service, John Walker, in a speech this week gave such emphasis to the private-sector corporate ethos that there might be a danger that the overriding public interest might be overlooked.
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Few other products in the history of human merchandising have had such little testing in the marketplace in comparison to numbers of items sold as the operating software package Windows 95. It is as if the lemmings are buying what they are told to buy, by a massive advertising campaign and barrage of media hype, rather than what they need or want to buy.

Sure, Windows 95 will be an improvement on the old operating system. But initially, according to some experts, it will have bugs.

Other experts suggest that Windows 95 will do nothing more than Apple computers have been capable of for years. If this is the case Bill Gates and his Microsoft corporation are to be congratulated on one of the biggest corporate scams in human history _ to get 50 million users to pay for the repackaging of someone else’s ideas to run on machinery that other people have bought from someone else.
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Now the furore over the Chinese Embassy has died down, the Federal Government has taken a more sensible and conciliatory approach on the publication of security matters. Earlier this year, the Foreign Minister, Gareth Evans, sought “”significant penalties” to deter publication of security matters. He wanted to fine and jail journalists and fine media companies for publishing a wide range of material that might affect Australia’s national interest. There are already penalties for the security operatives who leak the material in the first place. There already are some sweeping, but unused criminal provisions for those who publish the leaks. Senator Evans, however, wanted more detailed and explicit sanctions to stop secondary publication. It was a dangerous course in a liberal-democratic society.

The formulation and application of tests about what is a “”security matter” could see any attempt at legal sanctions be turned into bans on publishing things which might embarrass the government rather than things genuinely prejudicial to Australia’s national interest. Presumably, Senator Evans thought that the disclosures over the bugging of the Chinese Embassy in Canberra would be enough to attract criminal sanctions under his new regime. Yet, just a few months later, we see that there is no discernible difference in Australia-Chinese relations as a result of the disclosure.
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Of the 21 people who have been Governor-General of Australia, only one has been called upon to make a decision that in any way prfoundly affected the lives of Australians. That was Sir John Kerr in 1975.

For the rest of the 95-year history of the position, the occupants have not had to make serious decisions or to weigh up competing interests or arguments. In that sense it is not a taxing job. Sure, it is demanding on time and requires a modicum of social grace and an ability to make a good speech. Stripped of its nominal casting as the top position in the Australian political heirarchy, the practical elements of the job are not difficult. The mere fact that various incumbents and supporters of the office have protested too much to the contrary illustrates the point.
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The owner of the hand that signed the paper apparently did not use her own name and identity. Helen “”Demidenko”, the 24-year-old winner of the Miles Franklin award with her first novel The Hand that Signed the Paper is not the daughter of an illiterate migrant Ukrainian taxi driver telling a a story about her father’s wartime experience. She is Helen Darville, daughter of English migrants, who used the Ukrainian name, according to her brother, to protect her family and to make the story of the book “”seem more real”.

The former is an acceptable reason for taking a nom de plume. The latter is a deception. That deception has been compounded in subsequent interviews when Demidenko has presented as fact various lies about her family.
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There is something disquieting about developers sooling lawyers upon citizens giving submissions to the leasehold inquiry.

The sooling has taken the form of defamation writs and applications to cross-examine those giving written submissions _ people of modest resources who do not have tax-deductible legal expenses and who are not working from the profit motive, though the developers would argue they are coming from a selfish position of keeping the city as it is.

Justice Paul Stein, who heads the inquiry, has quite properly rejected submissions to have lawyers cross-examine those giving submissions. The inquiry is not adversarial. It is an inquiry to see whether the law and administration of the leasehold system are working well or if there have been defects, to recommend change.
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Nick Greiner has certainly learnt his lesson about Australian politics in the 1990s. How dare he be so courageous as to say something about gutlessness in Australian politics. And what a foolish fellow to imagine that the Australian media would have treated a thoughtful hypothesis of trends and ideas in any way other than in terms of personalities. Mr Greiner has clearly been in the business environment too long _ fancy imagining politicians (former or present) actually reading the text of what he said before opening their mouths.

The reaction to Mr Greiner’s speech was a delicious confirmation of its content _ the price of courage in Australian politics these days is to have your ideas spun, misinterpreted and hit with a fear campaign so that retreat or defeat is inevitable.

It means, of course, that any attempt at worthwhile reform is doomed. It means that change that result in dishing out govenment money gets done, but changes for greater efficiency or changes with short-term painfor long-term gain get taken off the agenda.
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