Crispin Hull

Our school soccer referee brought an unorthodox sense of balance to friendly matches. If one side got too far ahead, he joined in, taking possession of the ball, racing up the field and passing to a player near the goal, his referee’s whistle silent in his mouth as the clearly off-side receiving player dropped the ball into the goal.

The other extreme is totally unrefereed games _ like backyard cricket. Unrefereed games are fine if the rules, otherwise they degenerate into boycotts and violence.

So to is Westminster politics. Suddenly something unexpected happens and someone says it is “”tippity runs” or “”over the fence is six and out”. Pandemonium breaks out.
Continue reading “1995_07_july_column18jul”

Let me tell you about the Indian Step Ladder. It is a bit like the Indian Rope Trick.It comes to mind because the newly appointed Air Services Australia board has come under immediate fire because none of its members know anything about electronics. Electronics is the key to air traffic control, which is the board’s main concern.

It is not new for government board appointments to come under fire for knowing little or nothing about the things they are supposed to be supervising. It happened for a long time and happens at the state and territory level, too.

I am not picking on the ASA. The new board members probably have all sorts of other skills that make each appointment respectable, worthwhile and defendable, but the most of the Acts of Parliament that create boards and authorities and give Ministers the power to make appointments to them are very short on qualifications and process to ensure appointments are good ones.
Continue reading “1995_07_july_column11jul”

One of the great esoteric philosophic debates of the millennium … almost on par with the mind-body distinction … rudely intruded into the modern world of realpolitik last week. The debate is between natural law and what is called legal positivism.

Despite its name, legal positivism is not some trendy New Age drivel. Rather, it is the philosophy that says law is a human-made thing and law is only that which is generally enforceable or consented to. The natural lawyers, on the other hand, say there is a higher law, some innate principles of human conduct that can transcend the immediate human-made rules. New Age drivel, if you like, but with a longer pedigree.

Natural law waned a bit with the onset of the scientific age, rationalism and the decline of religion. But it made a bit of a comeback immediately after World War II. This was because you could not have a lot of legal positivist ex-Nazis wandering about saying that the law of Germany at the time said they could kill and torture so they were not answerable to some higher law.
Continue reading “1995_07_july_column04jul”

Despite the hype of the March Federal by-election, Labor has to be favoured to win all three ACT seats.It is not only because of Bob McMullan’s announcement this week. There are other factors.Let’s take the Liberals’ candidate for Namadgi, Brendan Smyth.

The trouble for Brendan Smyth is that he was pre-selected by the Liberal Party for the by-election because he was very electable.

The Liberals did a lot of profile polling _ finding out what sort of person the good voters of Tuggeranong would elect. Someone like us, they replied. Between 30 and 40, married with kids, a PAYE taxpayer and living in Tuggeranong.
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While everyone is concentrating on the method of (ital) selecting (end ital) the Head of State, the single biggest change in the Keating Republic package is the method of (ital) removing (end ital) of the Head of State. At present the Prime Minister can phone the Palace and the Governor-General is gone. Under the Keating plan the President can only be removed by a two-thirds majority of Parliament. It is perhaps odd that a Labor Prime Minister, particularly one who was one of the Ministers dismissed by the Governor-General in 1975 should be proposing the slight strengthening of the position of the person who holds the equivalent office in the Republic. At present the Prime Minister has the upper hand on the Governor-General. Forewarned by the events of 1975, a Prime Minister would be set to dismiss any hostile Governor-General in the event of a constitutional crisis.

Under the Keating plan that would not be possible. This is the single biggest change in Keating’s proposal. It shows that at last, 20 years after the event, Australia cease to be haunted by the spectre of 1975 as something that defines political motives and the constitutional position of each of the major parties. But perhaps Australia is hung up on the events of 1975 unnecessarily. The experience should tell any Leader of the Opposition that it would be better to wait for a normal election than to force an early one and carry the debilitating taint of illegitimacy that Malcolm Fraser had despite his majority. Malcolm Fraser only had to wait 18 months for Government to fall into his lap. Dismissals and removals aside, Paul Keating sought to persuade Republicans as much as allay the fears of wavering monarchists last night. It was an appeal to the Republicans’ minds, more than their hearts. People’s hearts tell them they want to vote directly for the President. You hear them on talkback radio; they told the Republic Advisory Committee; you read them in the letters columns; they tell you face to face and they tell the opinion pollsters the same thing.
Continue reading “1995_06_june_repub08”

Rates had moved far higher as an average per year under the four years of Labor than they would under the Liberals next financial year, according to the ACT Government. The Government issued suburb-by-suburb figures showing rates at 1991-92 and 1994-95 with percentage increases. The accompanying table shows those figures and the new figures for 1995-96. The Government is to increase rates by an across-the-board 4 per cent. There will be no new land valuations in 1995-96 so it means each householders will get an increase of exactly 4 per cent on last year’s rates _ fulfilling an electionpromise to keep everyone’s rates under the CPI.

The Opposition says it would in inequitable to move away from basing rates on current valuations. If there had been new valuations, rates would have gone down in some places and up by more in others to reflect values. This would have been more equitable. goes as blockline under rates table. The table shows average rates suburb-by-suburb. The percentage increase is between 1991-92 and 1994-95. The new average rates for 1995-96 are in the right-hand column. They are 4 per cent higher than the 1994-95 rate.

One of the keys to Gary Humphries’ proposal to virtually wipe the planning slate clean and start again depends on a change of Government at the Federal level.

There are too many political ties between it and the National Capital Planning Authority board for it to agree to it abolition. The board has had some good members with a great deal of expertise from time to time. But it has also had some appointments with strong Labor connections. And that is not likely to change in the future.

Under the Humphries proposal the National Capital Planning Authority and the Act Planning Authority would be scrapped and replaced with one Canberra Planning Authority. Its independent board would have federal and local board members and a chair who would be seen as a representative of neither.
Continue reading “1995_06_june_plan”

While architect of Medicare, Neal Blewett, basks in the glory of his Order of Australia, the past fortnight has revealed skimping on repairs and maintenance of the scheme that could be very costly in the long run.By any international measure Australia’s health system is very good, but it is in danger of becoming merely good and later, perhaps, mediocre.

It is not just a question of dealing with the aging population and the decline in private health coverage. It is a question of changing fixed ideological positions, attacking professional privileges and taking some courageous decisions about may engender short-term anguish for long term gain.

This week saw the fall-out from the Federal Budget decision to cut the number of medical graduates from 1200 to 1000. It threatens the clinical schools in Canberra and Darwin that are attached to the University of Sydney. Last week saw Opposition Leader John Howard affirm no change to the basics of Medicare.
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Lawyers, grandfathering and governmental weakness have moulded Australia’s media policy in the past decade and events this week show that nothing has changed.On Wednesday, the Opposition accused the Government of making mogul-specific media rules. It said the latest plan to have an absolute rule that no television proprietor could have more than a 15 per cent share in a newspaper in the same city was directed at Kerry Packer because he had offended Labor. Mr Packer is seeking to increase his 17 per cent share in Fairfax.

The Prime Minister Paul Keating denied this, saying the proposed change was merely to strengthen laws in place since the 1980s. And Communications Minister Michael Lee said that his latest proposals would not be set in stone “as the lawyers are always coming up with new ways to seek to get around the rules”. It is a Punch and Judy show of the disingenuous and the spineless.

Mr Keating’s statement is a convenient rewriting of legislative history. In 1992 his Government changed what was then a blanket prohibition against 15 per cent or more ownership of a newspaper by a television licensee. That absolute threshold was changed to an indicative threshold of 15 per cent which a licensee could go over provided he was not exercising “control”. “Control” was defined in a convoluted schedule to the Act of several thousand words. Small wonder that Kerry Packer’s lawyers could _ in the words of Mr Lee _ get around the rules. And he did, lifting his share in Fairfax beyond the 15 per cent mark. Spineless.
Continue reading “1995_06_june_leader30jun”

Publisher Ita Buttrose has a point when she says, “We have become so politically correct that we’ve become a nation of bores. The majority of us have been silenced by the frowns of the loud-mouthed minority groups.”

The germ of her argument was not that people should be encouraged to engage in rampant racist or sexist tirades. Rather she was pointing out that major business figures and some politicians were afraid to engage in any public discussion at all for fear of causing offence. Large areas of debate were beyond discussion by many people: multiculturalism; Aboriginal policy; environment; and women’s issues. The extent to which this is true can be debated. There is certainly no shortage of rednecks, but that is not the point. It would be a poor day for Australia if we became, as Ms Buttrose says, a nation of wimps when it comes to speaking out. The response to people who say things we disagree with is not to be offended and to ostracise the speaker, but to engage in further debate.