Crispin Hull

Senator Bob McMullan has reassured us that any bugging of the Chinese Embassy would not result in a trade disadvantage. He said about the allegations _ that the Foreign Minister would neither confirm nor deny _ that Chinese officials would talk about trade inside the building to Australians, so the Americans _ who got first bite at the intelligence _ would not have got an advantage. Sounds like McMullan is acknowledging the truth of the bugging allegation _ that the embassy was laced with fibre optics during its construction.

The Attorney-General’s Department was pretty hot on the allegations, too. They desperately attempted to suppress them and even suppress the fact that the department was trying to suppress the allegations. The sinister nature of suppressing the fact of suppression was illustrated with an exchange with The Canberra Times. When told by a departmental officer that the Government would seek suppression of the act of suppression itself, The Canberra Times representative (who has wide knowledge in this field) said something like: “”This is unprecendented!” To which the departmental officer replied sagely: “”No; it’s not.” Of course, only he and his department would know. Anyway, McMullan’s comments and the vigour with which the government attempted to suppress the story indicate it is true. The media have been chastised, implicitly, for not acting “”in the national interest” by blowing this story when they should have voluntarily suppressed it. It is a view that does not sit well with the law _ a law passed by the Australian Parliament. The Diplomatic Privileges and Immunities Act embraces into Australian law the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Section 7 says: “”Articles 1, 22 to 24 (inclusive) and 27 to 40 (inclusive) of the Convention have the force of law in Australia and in every external Territory.” Article 22 says: “”1. The premises of the mission shall be inviolable.
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The cry is out for Tony De Domenico to stand down pending an inquiry by the Act Human Rights Office into allegations by a former member of his staff into allegations of sexual harassment. Mr De Domenico should stand his ground and the Chief Minister, Kate Carnell, should resist the cries. The reason is because of the nature of the process of investigation into sexual harassment in the ACT and indeed in the rest of Australia.

The Discrimination Act is at great pains to provide as informal process as possible. It works under the assumption that the sexual harassed and others in society likely to be discriminated against are likely to be intimidated by formality and unnecessarily complex processes to instigate an investigation. And so the Act provides that all a complainant need do is put the complaint in writing and name the alleged perpetrator. From there, the Act Human Rights Office takes over the case.

Once it does, it is given very wide discretionary powers about gather evidence and the way it will conduct its inquiry. Informality is all the rage. This is very unlike the process of criminal investigation. A criminal investigation usually begins with a complaint to the police _ not to the person or organisation that will conduct the inquiry. The police then scurry off digging up more evidence and then present it to the Director of Public Prosecutions or some other prosecuting arm. The prosecutor then decides if there is enough evidence to press charges, usually determined according to whether there is a reasonable prospect of securing a conviction.
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Someone must have designed the roads near the Erindale Centre very carefully. Every time I go there I get lost. At the weekend, someone else was driving. He assumed the semi-automaton state of a driver who can’t find something. I was developing a small architectural and landscaping thesis about Canberra which began with Erindale Centre, but it was totally lost on him, so I thought it should go to a wider audience. Erindale does not have an entrance.

Nor does it have a decent sign to say what it is. And there are precious few signs pointing the way to it. Buildings throughout Canberra suffer from lack of entrance and good signage. Take the National Gallery of Australia, for example. The sign outside is pitiful. You wouldn’t know you were there unless you had a map. The gallery doesn’t seem to know whether it’s address is King Edward Terrace or the lake shore. So it tucks its entrance at the side. The National Science and Technology is the same. You drive down King Edward Terrace and you see what looks like the grand front entrance, but it turns out to be fake.
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Late at night, just before deadline some drunk would ring the sports desk. With slurred words he would ask: “”Me and me mate wuz just having a bet, see. We wanna know which horse came last in the 1953 Melbourne Cup.” On another night it would football. Rarely cricket. That was a decade and a half ago, when people still went to pubs and made obscure sporting bets. Now the obscure sporting bet is under threat from another source and a story will illustrate the point. In Nepal last month, miles from the nearest phone or newspaper sports desk, several Australian and English trekkers bizarrely starting talking about the FA Cup.

I told them about the time I went to an FA Cup final. I was in England in 1983 on one of those onerous journalists’ fact-finding missions and the organisers had arranged for us to go to Wembley Stadium on a quiet Monday, just after the weekend’s final. But the final had been a draw and had to be replayed that Wednesday night. Would we like tickets? And thus I went to the Manchester United vs Brighton final, I told my fellow trekkers. “”Brighton!” the Englishman scoffed. “”Brighton has never been in an FA Cup final. It’s in the bottom of the fourth division.” “”I’m pretty sure it was Brighton,” I replied _ taken aback at being accused of being on a fact-finding mission and not finding the critical fact of the team names of the competing finalists who played before my own eyes. “”It was Brighton,” I repeated.
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Last year when Neighbourhood Watch ill-advised people to resist intruders with “”utmost force”, I made the reluctant observation that whatever the law said in theory, “”as a rule of thumb, police do not charge people with assault, manslaughter or murder when an intruder with proven guilty intent is set upon by householder.” And so it was last week that police in Queensland did not charge a man who shot dead a 16-year-old intruder. It was a bit of shame because it would have given a more balanced view of the risks facing householders and a more balanced view of their rights. There are not many cases on issue. This may seem surprising, but it is a natural consequence of the rarity of householders having to confront intruders in Australia. Burglars go to extraordinary lengths to ensure the occupiers of the houses they burgle are out. The rarity of cases is also due to the unfortunate tendency by police not to charge house-holders who shoot, kill or maim intruders.

I take this perverse view, not in defence of criminals who break into houses, but of the householders themselves and to defend the principle of the rule of law (even if it is so often unsatisfactorily applied in Australia these days). On defending householders themselves, much has been correctly written about how a gun in the house is much more likely to be used to kill or maim someone in the household than an intruder. Suicide, accidental shootings and shootings of innocent intruders are more common than the shooting of criminal intruders. Guns put the householder and family at risk. Also the householder can be sued for shooting innocents. That aside, the reasoning for householders to arm themselves does not stand up. The actual threat of being assaulted by an intruder is virtually non-existent and there are better means than guns to minimise it further.
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The anarchic freedom of the Internet, nurtured if not conceived in Australia in the best academic tradition of free flow of knowledge, has been flogged off at a steal to Telstra (Telecom’s commercial name). The Australian Academic Research Network (AARNet) is the Australian gateway to the Internet _ which itself was generated 25 years ago in the US as a lose connection between universities for transmission of academic matter. With the invention of the cheap PC and modem greater numbers of people have connected by phone to hub “”sites” through AARNet to the Internet.

The sites with 10 or more phone lines and a large computer are run by companies and non-profit groups. They pass messages to the 20 million users connected to the net. They provide access to information stored at other sites. They store material in their own sites which is available to all. And they provide different rules and rates for access competitively. There are several hundred of them in Australia. Telstra has bought that client base. There are thousands of sites throughout the world. They and the users who connect to them are the Internet _ no-one has overall control. Academics are fearful because Telstra has a deal with Microsoft for a separate information network called On Australia. Telstra says it will be separate. Some academics are fearful that the Chinese wall will disappear and Microsoft will end up in control.
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A cop car is often parked on the verge hidden behind some trees on my way to work. Indeed, I saw the cop and the car again yesterday after a hard morning rush hour making the roads safer for me to drive on. But yesterday was different. The cop actually drove over the space next to a yellow-post bus stop, demounted the gutter and drove off. Yesterday was also different because the day before the High Court had just brought down a decision throwing out a heroin-trafficking conviction because the evidence under-pinning it had been collected illegally. Hello, I thought at 60km-h, this cop has driven over a verge illegally and parked illegally in order to collect evidence to prosecute people for speeding.

I wonder if all the good middle-class easy defendants would form an orderly queue at the High Court to get their fines refunded. Obviously not, but there would be a certain outrage among them that the heroin trafficker goes free. The cases have obvious differences. Mounting kerbs is not in the same league as cops actually importing heroin themselves in order to set up a trap. Moreover, it is probably legal for traffic cops to break the road rules to pursue errant motorists. They also have similarities and pose the question: under what circumstances do you allow the cops to break the law to catch crooks. The answer might be never. The ultimate solution should be to make lawful conduct that would otherwise be unlawful. Someone should authorise police under-cover work that might otherwise be illegal _ because that might be the only way to catch the crims. It’s a problem, though, on a couple of counts.
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1. Rinzin Sherpa 2. Marit Kleppa 3. Sherpa child watches a porters carry trekkers’ packs at Lukla. 4. Tibetan trader who has come to the Nepalese village of Namche Bazar (correct) to sell his wares. 5. Trekkers tents pitched on what was a potato patch at Namche Bazar. Inthe background is Khumbila (5761). 6. Dr Peter Penev (“”Dr Igor”), left, Joe Pilaar, centre, with Peter Aghar who has come out of the Gamow Bag with pulse oximeter attached to his finger. 7. (In news file in the system nuber 4179…… The Gamow Bag with Peter Aghar inside). 8. A Buddhist chorten. Walkers should walk to the left and they are deemed to have said all the prayers on the rock and flags. 9. Trader at Namche Bazar (correct). 10. Our porters, Mora Sata Basad, left, and Tika Ram Nirauia. Behind them is Mount Khumbila (5761m). 11. Sherpa woman and child on the track between Monjo and Nache Bazar in the Everest region.

The Nepalese village of Namche Bazar (subs correct) is filled with incessant clinking of metal against stone _ it is a sign of change. There is no rhythm to it. The clinks are an irregular background noise _ like a movie scene of prisoners in a quarry. But it is not made by prisoners, rather by the stonemasons of Namche Bazar _ a trading village in the Himalayan foothills, just below Mount Everest. It has been a trading centre for centuries as people have come and gone with their yaks through the Himalayan passes from Tibet bringing wool and carpets in return for butter and leather. Three events in the past 100 years have profoundly changed the village (and indeed the whole of the Sherpa highground) _ the last of which has caused all the clinking of stone. The first was the coming of the potato in the mid-nineteenth century which caused a doubling of the population because the potato has a far higher yield than the traditional buckwheat. The second was the subjugation of Tibet by China in the 1950s and the effective closing of the Nepal-Tibet border.

By doing it, the Chinese applied a religious tourniquet to the Sherpas of Nepal, cutting off the Buddhist Nepalese Sherpas from the great Buddhist monasteries to the north. It also caused a partial economic blockade. But the Sherpas are an patient, adaptable people. The passes to Tibet have been at least partially re-opened, even if Chinese repression in Tibet continues, and the Sherpas have taken economic advantage of the third change even if it has come at a cultural price. The third change began in earnest on May 29, 1953, when Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa climbed Mount Everest. Of more immediate import than the conquest was what came in its wake _ a desire by many non-mountaineers to merely to see the mountain close up and a desire by others to climb both Everest and the other major peaks. The Hillary and subsequent expeditions brought with them large support crews, some locally engaged and some from abroad.
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Canadian climber Peter Aghar struggled out of the Gamow Bag and said: “”That feels great.” It was the opposite of the rapture of hypoxia. The bag had been used to re-oxygenate his blood. The Gamow Bag is a tubular pump-up bag a bit bigger that a body and is used to give climbers precious time against altitude sickness. Altitude sickness is quite random. It can strike the fittest, youngest and healthiest while smokers, older people and those who succumb to the slightest head cold seem immune. There is only one cure _ to go down. And even then it can bee too late. The first symptom is headache, then nausea, disorientation and finally coma and death. Not a great deal is known about why it strikes some and not others. For example, Fabian Sada Sherpa (the guide on our Peregrine trek in the Himalayas) told of a marathon runner who has succumbed at 3400 metres.

Perhaps the lack of knowledge is due to altitude sickness _ which is invariably self-induced _ quite rightly not being high on the list of world public-health priorities. To get greater knowledge a Canadian group from Canadian Himalayan Expeditions with a couple of doctors was in the Himalayas earlier this month with a couple of gadgets to record what happens to human bodies of various shapes, sizes and fitness. I was lucky to catch up with them at Namche Bazar at 3446 metres and again a couple of days later at Thyangboche (3875m). For those who will never measure height above sea level in anything by feet, that is 11,306 feet and 12,713 feet, respectively. They were going to climb Island Peak (6360m, 21,000ft), recording data on what was happening to their bodies.

They had two critical gadgets: the Gamow Bag, or portable hyperbaric bag, and the pulse oximeter. The pulse oximeter is a very neat piece of work. It is about the size of a large portable phone. Attached to it by wire cord is an enclosed finger slot about half the size of a match box. You put you finger in the slot and the machine reads both your pulse and the percentage saturation of oxygen in the blood. At sea level it should be a tad under 100 per cent. The two readings are related. The heavier you breathe to compensate for the thin oxygen, the higher your pulse and the better your oxygen saturation. In the long term (several months) people at high altitudes produces a higher proportion of haemoglobin _ the oxygen bearing red cells in the blood. It works by a small infra-red beam measuring the redness of the blood which is an indicator of oxygen saturation. Dr Peter Penev of Toronto explained that of the percentage of oxygen saturation drops suddenly you are in trouble.
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