Crispin Hull

The Greens had insulated ACT decisions from Federal issues and the vote should be seen in local terms. The Greens had not yet decided how to direct preferences for the by-election, he said. There is a debate within the Greens about whether to direct preferences away from Labor for the by-election _ where government is not at stake _ to show that Labor should not take Green preferences for granted and that Labor should change its policies away from logging towards forest protection. Others in the Greens party argue that it would be unfair to have a put-Labor-last campaign when Labor’s candidate, Sue Robinson, has been a strong advocate against logging in native forests.

The Assembly’s standing committee system has been cut by 11 positions and two committees under a structure proposed by Independent MLA Michael Moore and supported by the Liberals and Paul Osborne. The key change is the amalgamation of the former planning and environment committees. Mr Moore is expected to chair that committee which will have three other members a Green and one each from the majors.
Continue reading “1995_03_march_ctees”

The new Canon portable colour Bubble Jet printer which is to come on tot he market in May for $645 after being on display at PC95 in Sydney. It weighs just 1.4 kilograms. The true four-colour printer comes with nickel hydride battery and prints on plain or glossy paper or overhead transparencies. It has a 136 nozzle head fed from a tri-chambered cyan, magenta and yellow cartridge and a black cartridge so it can do full colour or mono. Canon says it is a smallest and lightest full colour printer in the world. A shot from the 1906 Australian film “The Story of Ned Kelly” which is to be restored by the National Film and Sound Archive using a computer technique developed by Seimens Ltd in Australia. The restoration technique is a spin-off from video compression research done by Seimens, Telstra and Monash University. When the film is digitally compressed sound defects caused by scratches and dust will be removed and the picture will be improved.

There has been far too much self-righteous tut-tutting in Australia over the O. J. Simpson case. “”We would never do that here. Our courts wouldn’t allow it. They would bring the media into line with “proceedings’ for contempt so that justice could be dispensed properly. Tut, tut, tut.” The Americans are fortunate to have the Simpson case and a law which permits the media to give the public blow-by-blow descriptions.

As a result the O. J. Simpson case may turn out to be one of the most effective pieces of public education in America’s history. And the publicity may change the way courts work for the better. In Australia, people have little idea about what goes on in court, even though courts are open to the public. Educators and the media may present hypotheticals or in-depth analysis after the event, but there is nothing like live drama to excite public interest. And the television ratings tell us that they are interested. There interest maybe prurient, but if that results in a little education about how the legal system works, all to the good. It will be even better if the case results in some Australians learning about the common law _ its defects and merits _ because they will not get a similar opportunity here. What are we seeing in the Simpson case? For a start, we are not seeing a search for the truth. We are seeing a contest. That contest is being fought on the evidence. But the evidence is not the sort of evidence that you or I might regard as pertinent to drawing conclusions about something. Rather it is only the evidence permitted under common-law rules.
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The civil libertarians had an awkward time at a conference in Melbourne last week. On one hand, civil libertarians support the public’s right to know _ especially when some sinister bureaucracy is trying to hide something. On the other hand, they support individual privacy against some meddling data-collecting bureaucracy. At the Melbourne conference, however, the civil libertarians were not faced with bureaucrats but epidemiologists.

These scientists gather information about whole populations to see if certain diseases or health defects can be linked with certain risk factors. The conference was held by the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine and the Victorian Department of Health and Community Services. The civil liberties view is very much based on the individual and it has been very successful in the past decade. We have freedom of information laws in all jurisdictions which (at least in theory) uphold the public’s right to know and we have privacy laws in most jurisdictions that protect privacy. To date there has not been a significant conflict. The freedom-of-information law requires information that might identify individuals to be blacked out of documents.
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The Greens Party of Australia got its best result in a mainland election to date on Saturday with 13 per cent in the Canberra by-election. I use the full term “”Greens Party of Australia”, rather than “”the Greens” or “”the Green movement” for good reason. The Greens candidate, James Warden, very consciously stood on issues going beyond the forests or conservation in general. He stood on a range of policies, including health, education and economic policy. This approach was taken by the Greens in the ACT election and has been hallmark of the successful Green candidates in Tasmania, notably Bob Brown. Essentially, the Greens are presenting a complete, alternative political philosophy. The Greens have moved far beyond being a single-issue party in the way the aircraft-noise party presented themselves in the NSW election (despite their protestations to the contrary). For good of for bad, they are essentially opposed to the wide extent market forces at present have in determining resource allocation of resources.

They propose alternative medicine and education, with heavy emphasis on ecology, are far more collectivist and are what the Greens Party would call more grassroots democratic than present structures. If it sounds a little Marxist and ideologically doctrinaire, it is perhaps because it is so. As a result, the Greens Party’s success has some fall-out for the conservation movement. This movement comprises a vast range of community and pressure groups such as the Wilderness Society, the Australian Conservation Foundation, various conservation councils and many smaller groups interested in things as diverse as reptiles, old buildings, art and culture. The people in the movement might not especially like the discipline of party politics, or some of the policies the party stands for. In a way conservationists might be in a similar position as trade unionists last century _ do they pursue their claims through the existing parties or do they set up their own with a full range of policies? In Britain last century, unionists thought they could not get a good result from either the Whigs (Liberal Party) or the Tories (Conservative Party), so set up the Labour party. By the 1920s Labour had replaced the Liberals as the second first in a two-party system. It is by no means an exact analogy, but it is certainly a long-term hope of the Greens Party to become government. Dr Brown says that in proportional systems they can creep up gradually; in single-member systems they have to get across a threshold first and then get a large number of seats in one go. Either way, though, the aim is government. At first blush, various conservation groups might applaud the Greens Party success.
Continue reading “1995_03_march_column28mar”

A sure way to disgruntle a gruntled employee is to change the computer system. Someone is happily working away on Word for Windows or WordPerfect or some other favourite program and suddenly an order comes from on high that the place is to transfer to Ami-Pro or Excel or something else. There are several possible reasons: an arrogant new boss wants everyone else to change to what he is used to (and it is usually a he); a boss who is good at business but knows nothing about human nature or information-technology buys an upgrade and cross-over to a new program at a very good price; a boss who knows a lot about information technology but nothing about human nature upgrades hopelessly inefficient software. Several people in the public sector have expressed horror to me privately recently about sudden pending changes; and I’m sure the private sector is just as bad. At the moment, though, the public-sector is (to use a rabbit-shooting cliche) in the spotlight. Last week the Department of Finance began its softening up of other departments with the report of the Information Technology Review Group. Its main recommendation was the appointment of a Chief Information Officer within the Department of Finance to clean up the way the Commonwealth uses information.

This chief will not be very popular in the departments which have basically run their own IT fiefdoms since information technology was first introduced into the Federal Public Service (when a phone was put into the Treasury in 1901). His chief is going to be a little like the bosses mentioned about who set about disgruntling gruntled employees _ except he will be doing it to whole departments. Now, departments do not like interference from other departments (least of all finance) at the best of times, but interference in the IT area goes to the heart. This is because it reaches into nearly every aspect of what every department does. At present the Australian Public Service has 100,000 personal computers and dozens of very large mainframes dotted about the country, though mainly in Canberra.
Continue reading “1995_03_march_column21mar”

Canberra should be industrialised and made into a typical Australian city, according to former Liberal Minister Fred Chaney. Mr Chaney said, “”It is a disaster for Australia for Canberra to be a model city because it made its bureaucracy out of touch with Australian reality. He was speaking in Perth at one of a series of seminars held by the National Capital Planning Authority to find out what Australians wanted from their capital. However, the Public Service Commissioner, Denis Ives, responded yesterday by saying that the public sector was less than half the Canberra workforce and when you took away the ACT public-sector _ which was very much a service deliverer _ a quite low percentage were Federal public servants and even lower percentage were involved in policy.

Canberra had developed into a light-industrial and service provider for the region. Mr Chaney rejected the view cited by NCPA chair Evan Walker from NCPA surveys that Australians did not want Canberra to be a microcosm of Australia. “”I think it poses an enormous problem that we have a bureaucracy which is largely living in city which is so atypical of Australia,” he said at the NCPA seminar last week.

“”One of the reasons the bureaucracy is so out of touch with Australian reality is because it does not live in a microcosm of Australia. It lives in a town with higher per capita incomes. I find many of the attitudes totally unrealistic and indeed wrong.” He gave an example. As Minister for Social Security he had said at a Canberra meeting that the primary obligation for care and nurture of children was with parents. He had been booed and hissed. Yet he had been merely quoting from the first page of the United Nations declaration of the rights of child. “”I just found in so many areas total dissociation from Australian reality,” Mr Chaney said.
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The local factors in the Canberra by-election are being diluted one by one and it may surprisingly come down to much more a test of national Labor and Liberal standing than first thought. That said, by-elections are a bit like the balance of payments figures, though less regular: it is not the actual result that counts but whether it is above or below market expectation. When Rose Kelly quit, market expectation was that Canberra is dyed-in-the-wool Labor so there was no point in the Liberals even fielding a candidate in the March 25 by-election.

Four things have changed that. The former Liberal Member for Canberra John Haslem reminded people that the Liberals have held the seat and he would have another crack at it; Alexander Downer lost the leadership; psephologist Malcolm Mackerras reminded people that big by-election swings happened when sitting members swanned off to swank jobs; and lastly Kate Carnell proved Labor does not have a mortgage over the ACT. Market expectation is that the 9.6 percent swing needed to win is difficult but not impossible. The local or unusual factors that might be claimed by either side after the vent to excuse a performance outside market expectations include: actions by the Greens (which might be different from a general election); the personality factors of both the retiring Ros Kelly and Labor’s candidate Sue Robinson; and the Canberra is different from the rest of Australia. Kate Carnell put paid to the last factor and the push-polling incident has meant that from here on in, the campaign will focus on issues and not personalities.
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The Ros Kelly saga will end on whiteboard on Saturday night when the results of the Canberra by-election come in. The Australian Electoral Commission does not set up a formal tally room for by-election, rather it faxes results to media organisations and for the public posts results during the evening on a whiteboard at the divisional office in Penrhyn House, Bowes Street, Woden.

The by-election has been caused by the resignation from Parliament of Labor’s Ros Kelly. Mrs Kelly has earlier been forced to resign from Cabinet as Environment Minister after the sports rorts affair during which she said that sports grants had been decided after information had been posted on a “”great big whiteboard” in her office. Was there any irony in the post of the by-election results? _ a firm no comment from the commission. The commission will be counting the votes of those of the 99,295 electors who cast their ballot on Saturday. The seat is held by Labor by 9.6 per cent. The table shows the two-party-preferred history of the seat since the 1977 election when it was just held by the Liberals. It ran to preferences in 1990, but it has none the less been a comfortable Labor seat for 16 years. There are no boundary changes since the 1993 election in the 421 sq km electorate. It takes in the following suburbs and the rural south of the ACT: Banks, Bonython, Calwell, Chapman, Chifley, Chisholm, Conder, Curtin, Deakin, Duffy, Fadden, Farrer, Fisher, Forrest, Fyshwick, Garran, Gilmore, Gordon, Gowrie, Greenway, Harman, Holder, Hughes, Hume, Isaacs, Isabella Plains, Kambah, Lyons, MacArthur, Mawson, Monash, Mt Stromlo, Oaks Estate, Oxley, Pearce, Phillip, Richardson, Rivett, Royalla, Stirling, Swinger Hill, Symonston, Tharwa, Theodore, Torrens, Uriarra, Wanniassa, Waramanga, Weston and Woden.
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Labor won only four of the 37 polling booths in Saturday’s Canberra by-election _ and two of them were the tiny booths of Urriara and Norfolk Island. The other two were Conder and Lyons where Labor’s Sue Robinson got 51 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote in each. In the two smaller booths she got better than 60 per cent. Otherwise it was a Liberal clean sweep. The Liberals’ Brendan Smyth did best in Fadden 65.5 per cent; Farrer 65 per cent; and Chapman 64.5 per cent of the two-party preferred vote. These figures are subject to correction and a fuller version of the booth-by-booth results will be published after the official count is completed.