Crispin Hull

The disputes over line items of of the Budget are becoming an annual event. Gone are the days when the Opposition formally moved a $1 amendment to the Budget and the thing went through the Parliament. Now, Democrats, Greens and the Opposition in the Senate actively vote down key revenue items. They rarely, if ever, vote down expenditure items. The exercise is tainted with opoprtunism and populism and goes beyond the function of the Senate both as a states House or as a legislature and, it could be argued, goes against the spirit of the Constitution if not against the legal interpretation of the words.

As an issue quite separate from the Republic, the question of the powers of the Senate needs looking at. Twenty years after the events of 1975, the question can be looked at with more reason and less passion. There is no need for Liberals to argue for greater powers and for Labor people to argue for lesser powers. Rather the matter should be visited again on first principles. The spirit of the Constitution is to create government on the floor of the House or Representatives and for the Government through that House to be able to raise and spend money. It denies the Senate the power to originate or amend money Bills.

The Founding Fathers foresaw the American trick of Governments tacking on non-money matters to money Bills to stymie the Senate. The Constitution reflects that by insisting tax bills deal only with tax and that separate taxes are dealt with in separate Bills. They foresaw the trick of the Senate amending money Bills almost out of existence. But they could not have foreseen the events in Britain in 1911 when the House of Lords rejected a money Bill outright. If those events had occurred before the Australian Constitution had been drafted, no doubt the Senate would have been specifically precluded from rejecting money Bills.
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It is clear that the present prohibition policy on narcotic drugs is not working. It is not reducing the number of addicts _ indeed it might be increasing them. It is not treating the health problems of addicts. It is making it more difficult for addicts to lead a reasonably normal life while they get off their habit. But worse than this, the prohibition policy has created a very high-price black market in drugs. The amounts of money involved are so large that they have corrupted a significant part of the law-enforcement structure. The Royal Commission into the NSW police force has shown the insidious, corrupting nature of the heroin trade. It turns addicts to crime to pay for their habit. It raises so much money for dealers that they can bribe police so they are not prosecuted. Stiffer penalties and drug seizures only seem to drive up the price and make the problem worse.

This week, however, evidence has come in that shows the community _ at least in the ACT _ is awake to the ineffectiveness of prohibition.

The Australian National University and the Australian Institute of Criminology reported after four years’ work on the risks and benefits of providing addicts with heroin. It recommended that a pilot study with a limited number of users be run first, before considering a wider program. They also conducted a survey on community attitudes to the trial. It showed majority approval. A majority believes it will result in less crime; less drug dealing on the streets; less police corruption; less spread of AIDS; and better health for addicts.
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The appointment of a Government Reform Advisory Group by the ACT Government satisfies an election promise by the Liberal Party, but other than that is a complete waste of time. Mercifully, it will cost only $20,000.Kate Carnell said in the he lead-up to the election that government arrangements since self-government in 1989 had been cumbersome, costly and adversarial. A city council style would be more effective. Presumably, she picked up whatever remnant anti-self-government vote was around in the absence of Dennis Stevenson who had recognised by then that it was not enough to get him a 12 per cent quota. The idea has now served its political purpose and should be taken off the agenda as quickly as possible.

There is no merit in the councils proposal. Councils can be just as adversarial as a Westminster parliament _ witness a hundred councils around the country that have divided on party lines or developer-green lines. They can be more costly _ as the Brisbane experience shows. And they can be just as cumbersome an ineffective and equally likely to send the contents of the too-hard basket to committees. Of greater significance, the council system seems far more susceptible to corruption than the Westminster system with Ministers responsible to a Parliament and answerable at Question Time.
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Rather than disagreeing with what Governor-Gener al Bill Hayden says but defend ing his right to say it, the con servative side of politics has both disagreed and said he had no right to say it.Mr Hayden’s comments on eu thanasia and same-sex mar riages have challenged the com munity, both for their content and on the question of whether the Australian Deputy (and de facto) Head of State should have made them.

One of the roles of an Austra lian Head of State, aside from the formal and ceremonial, is to somehow be an embodiment, symbol or representation of the Australian nation. That neces sarily means saying things be yond the trite.

Republic or not, the Australia resident de-facto Head of State is juxtaposed to the forceful single- issue minorities who sometimes get their way with MPs. MPs cannot afford to upset those mi norities because they will change their vote on that single issue, irrespective of other poli cy matters. For example, opin ion polls show consistently that people agree with tighter gun controls and a more liberal eu thanasia regime than current law provides.
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The British Prime Minister, John Major, has told Conservative dissidents to put up or shut up by declaring the leadership vacant and re-standing for the position. It is, however, a naive attempt to pre-empt a successful leadership challenge before the next election. It is apparent that no-one in the party has the numbers now to depose him. But that does not mean that even if he retains the leadership (challenged or unchallenged) next week that he will retain it until the next election. The history of leadership challenges in Westminster democracies shows the contrary. Invariably, the first vote is but a first round in a wider contest and a repeat bout becomes inevitable. The phenomenon is almost akin to boxing or the challenge of a buck deer. If anything the first encounter encourages a second rather than pre-empting it.

At first blush it might seem that the Euro-sceptics are at the bottom of John Major’s woes. This growing group of MPs _ now numbering almost 60 out of the Conservatives 340 or so MPs _ are concerned about what they see as Britain’s surrender of sovereignty to European bureaucrats in Brussels. Britain’s relationships in Europe have been contentious in both major parties for 25 years. MPs on both sides have taken views contrary to the their leadership either from conviction or opportunism. However, Europe is not the issue. Ultimately Britain must embrace Europe, even if that means a surrender of some sovereignty in the name of uniformity. Economically, it can only be to Britain’s benefit. Politically and socially there will be swings and roundabouts which will be the excuse for some MPs to tilt at the leadership.
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The Organisation for Economic Growth and Development which groups the main industrialised countries issued grim news for Australia this week.It used usual economic jargon to portray the bad news. It said the tightening of monetary and fiscal policy would not be enough to contain inflationary pressures and the current account deficit. In simple terms, we have lived on the international credit card too long and the steps the Government has taken are not enough to fix the problem. In the past, Australian Governments have frequently blamed international conditions for economic maladies at home. This time it cannot. The OECD says nearly all other nations are doing well. It might be slightly galling for some Australians to see New Zealand doing better than Australia at the Rugby World Cup, but it is of greater hurt to see that that Australian Governments did not have the fortitude of New Zealand Governments to make the hard decisions in the past decade that now enable New Zealanders to say they are doing better economically than Australia _ having cut their overseas debt and reduced unemployment at the same time keeping inflation reasonably low. Australia has kept inflation low, but foreign debt remains dangerously high. It was this element of Australian economy that caused the OECD to sound the alarm bell.

The Minister for Trade, Senator Bob McMullan, has rightly warned that the foreign debt cannot be turned around quickly; that investment decisions take time to come through; that capital imports are needed to give rise to import replacement. However, this is all the more reason to get good policy in place quickly so those slow processes can begin.
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The Federal Government got into a constitutional hole with its unfair dismissal legislation and the result has been costly for employers. The Australian Chamber of Commerce published a survey last week showing that employers were s concerned about the costs of the legislation that they were reluctant to hire full-time employees, preferring to hire part-timers and casuals.

In earlier times, a worker’s remedy for unfair dismissal largely depended on whether he or she was in a union. If so, industrial muscle could be used to get a reinstatement. If not, the worker was largely at the boss’s mercy. Thoughts by various state governments to apply a uniform law irrespective of union membership, until recently, fell on barren ground because it was thought such laws would play into the hands of already-too-strong unions. Several states have some unfair-dismissal provisions. Others do not.
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The president of the ACTU, Martin Ferguson, drew a very long bow indeed in attempting to link the gross civil rights abuses against unionists in Indonesia with the fairly modest changes, on world standards, made to industrial law in Victoria and Western Australia. Victoria and Western Australia rated small mentions in the annual survey of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. The report said that following changes to the law many workers had migrated to the Federal system. This is hardly surprising given the Federal Government’s favourable treatment of the union movement. However, mere movement of a large number of unionists to a regime which positively discriminates in their favour is no indication that the regimes they migrated from were engaged in active repression and civil rights abuses or, indeed, were involved in anything untoward at all.

The changes in Western Australia and Victoria merely took away some of the quite over-bearing power of unions and union officials in those states. To make comparisons with deplorable violence and discrimination against unions in other countries does the union movement in Australia no credit.

When judging the position of the industrial-relations laws in Victoria and Western Australia, the important test is the position of individuals.
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Federal Treasurer Ralph Willis has described the Australian Democrats’ decision to block the Budget’s building hardware tax as “populist and opportunist”. There is some truth in that; the Senate minor parties do not have to concern themselves with the overall fiscal picture. There is also some truth in the statement by Democrats leader Cheryl Kernot that the tax is unfair. It is also inefficient and hypocritical. Of itself, it is not large _ raising between $200 and $250 million a year. However, it exemplifies several major defects in the political landscape. The first is that the Budget process is not an especially good one for dealing with changes of policy, even the detail of fiscal policy. The secrecy that surrounds it may have been acceptable and workable 20 or 30 years ago. However, as government and society get more complex, more consultation is required to make better policy.

Secondly, the question of the Senate’s power over money Bills, not just Supply, is still not satisfactory. Raising taxes and spending money are the fundamentals of government. If the Senate flexes itself in the fiscal field, Australia will go down the American road of Budgets by compromise. The Senate is a fine general checking chamber (it has long lost its role of protecting states’ rights), but this should not run to major items of raising and spending money.
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The Legislative Assembly’s Planning and Environment Committee has shut the sheep pen door four months after the dipped sheep got away. Earlier this week the committee heard from two toxicologists that the health of residents living near former sheep dip sites had not suffered anything from abnormal levels of arsenic in the soil.

Just before the last election, though, the Government offered to buy the houses of several residents in Theodore for well over market values, and in at least one case the offer was accepted. Given that people had lived on these sites for some years _ and for several decades in another site in Lyneham _ without ill effect, ratepayers might well conder why the toxicologists were not consulted before the buy-out offers, rather than after it. But then perhaps there was not a great deal of time between the time the arsenic issue arose and the election. Elections tend to have this effect.

Perhaps it was inevitable that arsenic, residences and children would give rise to an emotive cocktail and that in these circumstances no government, government department is likely to win.
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