Crispin Hull

On a superficial level it appears that the sort of crime associated with late-night drinking has shifted from Civic to Manuka. The impression has been gained for several events, notable last New Year’s Eve where the unruly crowds of previous years appeared in Manuka. Last weekend problems arose again in Manuka, this time in the form of vandals hitting cars in the covered carpark in Manuka. Traders immediately called for a change in the law on drinking hours. The Attorney-General, Terry Connolly, has commendably not gone for the knee-jerk response. Rather he has referred the question to the Community Safety Committee.

This committee was responsible for the Civic by Night report which made recommendations that appear to have had beneficial effect in Civic. Those recommendations appear to have worked because they were not knee-jerk and they attempted to solve the problem with a range of measures: police, licensees and transport. Changing licence hours alone will do nothing. The experience of prohibition in the United States showed that people will get their grog from somewhere. The better response is multi-faceted. Licensees have to be convinced to act more responsibly with under-age drinking and serving intoxicated people. A greater on-the-ground presence of police forces is needed. Better late-night public transport is needed to prevent drink-driving. It may be, however, that the sort of vandalism seen in Manuka has deeper causes: unemployment and general alienation from society.

It is certainly true than changing drinking hours would not have prevented the vandalism at the weekend: it is common ground that it occurred between 9pm and 2am. The closing hours issue is centred on whether places outside Civic should close at 4am. So it may be that the few Manuka incidents this year do not represent a full-scale shift of the drink-crime problem from one location to another. The important point is that treating the causes of crime is more important than treating the symptoms. In the ACT, some very worthwhile work is being done with making criminals meet their victims so they can understand the grief and anger they cause and held repair the damage.

This is not as spectacular nor as easy as announcing huge increases in penalties (for people who may never be caught), but it is more effective. Being tough on causes of crime rather than symptoms may have become a political cliche in recent months. None the less it is true. Whether politicians can live up to it, however, is another matter. It may be that some will mouth the cliche and not do the unspectacular work of attacking the symptoms. Mercifully, even in this election environment we are not being treated to some of the idiocy seen in other states and territories where politicians, out for a quick vote, chant “”lock them up”.

The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Housing, Brian Howe, is quite right to be concerned about the state of Australia’s housing stock and its inefficiency and therefore its inability to provide housing for those most in need. He is right to say something ought to be done about it. However, all the indications are that the Government will look at the issue in isolation; it will deal with symptoms not causes. Mr Howe expressed his concern at the launch last week of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report entitled Public Housing in Australia. The report said that 216,000 households were waiting for public housing. It would cost some $8.6 billion to satisfy the demand. Australia has about 370,000 public houses. The trouble is, Mr Howe points out, that many houses built for families have only one or two occupants. In privately owned homes one house in three has two or more vacant bedrooms. He argues therefore there is a massively underused capacity, especially when there are so many without housing. He wanted the private and public sectors to work together to iron out the imbalance. He foreshadowed a National Housing Payment Scheme to help low-income renters in the private sector so that no-one had to pay more than 30 per cent of their income in rent _ a sort of housing Medicare.

He pointed out that rent assistance is the Commonwealth’s fastest growing social-justice program, with annual payments rising from $225 million in 1984-85 to $1.4 billion in 1993-94. Mr Howe may be proud of those figures, but in fact they demonstrate failure. If the Government keeps pouring money in so people can get into the private housing market, any first-year economics student knows that the result will be higher rents. As demand goes up; so do prices. So the more the Commonwealth pays in rent subsidies, the higher rents will go. But the housing situation is more profound than that. A huge range of factors determine how and where people house themselves and how much it costs. Housing cannot be looked at in isolation. The inefficiency of the housing stock is partly due to government policy and administration _ mainly state government policy. Put simply, the actions of state government make it extremely costly for people to move to more suitable housing. Typically, young families face a choice of extending an existing house or moving to a larger house. Similarly, older couples face the choice of staying in a large house after children have left, or of moving. State Government policy makes extending more attractive. Moving house entails very large, punitive stamp duties.
Continue reading “1995_01_january_leader22jan”

As the fighting in Chechnya enters its sixth week, the diplomatic hypocrisy rings clear in the silence of western governments. They have said only what a shame there has been such bloodshed _ no condemnation of its cause no support for those who democratic aspirations are being fired upon. It is as if they regretted the ineptitude of the Russian conscripts and the tenacity of the Chechen resisters. Such an untidy inconvenience. What a pity it could not have been wrapped up in a couple of days and then put out of the world’s conscience as Russia merely dealing with an internal affair _ an internal affair, the diplomatic euphemism for turning a blind eye to repression of minorities and oppositions. What a bitter irony in the conduct of world affairs that western governments pretending to follow the great tradition of President Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points should so blindingly support President Boris Yeltsin in the name of supporting democracy. The Cold War is dead but it rules western diplomacy from its grave.

The Soviet police state so joyously disbanded has regrouped. Chechnya joins Timor, Tibet and Burma on the sell-out list. Democracy is fine as long as it is not inconvenient, as long as it does not upset the power plays. Both western governments and Boris Yeltsin are foolishly mistaken if they believe that the resistance can be defeated in a short time. The historic pattern is that people with common language and culture will not abandon their hopes for independence, nor will people endlessly tolerate repression by external or internal rulers. The sooner that is recognised and western governments pressure Mr Yeltsin into unconditional talks the better. Mr Yeltsin present policy of refusing to talk to the Chechen leader Dzhokhbar Dudayev is painfully short-sighted _ not only for the people of Chechnya and the Russian soldiers needlessly sacrificed in the fighting, but also for Mr Yeltsin himself. What does he hope to gain? Does he want power over the Chechen people?
Continue reading “1995_01_january_leader21jan”

The sympathy of the world will be extended to Japan and particularly the people of Kobe whose city was severely damaged by earthquake this week. Nature can strike in a capricious and arbitrary way. It does not distinguish between the affluent and the poor or the developed and undeveloped. But its fall-out does. None is immune from human suffering, but the history of century’s earthquakes and many other natural disasters shows that more affluent societies usually get proportionately fewer deaths and injuries. This is because the infrastructure in those societies is that much better. Buildings and transport links are built stronger. Emergency services are more sophisticated; they can rescue more people more quickly and treat them better.

Aid usually comes more quickly to the stricken part of the nation. That said, no matter how affluent a nation is, present technology will not match the awesome forces of the movement of tectonic plates. Japan has invested awesome sums in earthquake prediction, setting up a system of under-sea and coastal monitors. The theory is that a big quake comes after a series of small ones. That apparently did not help this week. It is true that the bulk of Japan’s earthquake-prediction system is geared at the Pacific plate and Tokyo rather than the Philippine plate which caused this week’s quake, none the less, earthquake prediction seems a very risky insurance policy. Indeed, California _ which is also on a major fault line _ has abandoned the philosophy, instead spending the money on improving building control, building better buildings and strengthening existing ones.
Continue reading “1995_01_january_leader19jan”

The woes of the Civil Aviation Authority have continued in the past week with extraordinary comments by former CAA chair Dick Smith that the CAA somehow benefited from more crashes because it got extra money for each crash. Mr Smith is reported to have said there was “”almost a vested interest in the CAA having these planes crash”” because the CAA got extra cash for each crash. The CAA’s acting chief executive, Buck Brooksbank, acknowledged that the CAA had received an extra $6 million since the October 2 Seaview crash, but it had not be a per-crash amount. Rather it had been to swing the deregulatory pendulum back after the “”run-down of experienced regulatory staff, most of which occurred during Mr Smith’s time”.

On this occasion Mr Smith went over the top. It is silly and offensive to suggest that CAA enjoy crashes because they get more money from them. That said there is some merit in the arguments Mr Smith has been putting about air safety over the years and that these arguments need to be tested against others, hopefully with the outcome of a more efficient and equally safe airline industry. Broadly, Mr Smith has argued that there is no such thing as absolutely safe and that safety measures have to be measured against costs, especially for light aircraft. To date Australia has not had a death in a jet crash. At a price the safety required for jets could be required for light aircraft, but no-one could fly them because their cost per seat would be prohibitive. He has argued that there is a vested interest in the aviation industry to sensationalise safety issues so that more money and higher salaries are paid to people who maintain aircraft safety and for pilots. Some of the money would be better spent on allowing airline operators to buy newer and safety aircraft.
Continue reading “1995_01_january_leader09jan”

During the International Year of the Family a lot of discussion was generated about precisely what is a “”family”. On one hand, proponents of the traditional family argued that a heterosexual couple and children constituted “”family”. On the other hand, homosexual groups argued that a homosexual couple with or without children could constitute a “”family”. Other groups argued that various combinations of single parents, step-parents and children constituted “”families”. Again others took the view that its was, so to speak, sterile to debate the precise definition of “”family”; it was more important to work on how families could be helped _ by government, community groups, themselves and others. With the year ended two influential people with quite opposite views of what should be the definition of “”family” came out last week with their views. The Chief Judge of the Family Court, Justice Alistair Nicholson, called for homosexual couples and their children to be recognised as a family, under law and by society. The Leader of the National Party, Tim Fischer, said that if the homosexual agenda were taken to the extreme it would lead to a non-reproductive society. He said any change in the definition of family would lead to a denigration of the status of “”the true family”. Despite their opposing views, the view of both leaders make it clear that definitions in many respects are important. At the end of the Year of Family, for example, there seemed little point in having a raft of recommendations on (ital) how (end ital) government could help “”families” if no-one knows precisely (ital) who (end ital) is to be helped.

Moreover, even if the law does not have to define “”family” it does have to define various family relationships in order to determine various rights and duties that arise from those relationships. Mr Fischer made the pertinent point that “”it is for federal Parliament to define these matters in law”. He also made the impertinent and wrong point that it is not for judges to define these matters in law. In fact, both have the role of defining things. An enormous range of rights and duties depend on definitions of things like “”parent”, “”child”, “”husband”, “”wife”, “”child of the marriage”, “”father”, “”mother”, “”supporting parent” and “”surviving spouse”. The most important legal duties associated with these definitions is the duty to support dependants physically and financially.
Continue reading “1995_01_january_leader08jan”

Recent increases in consumer-credit interest rates and increases in bank charges are hitting the people least able to afford it and people who are least able to rearrange their affairs so that they can reduce their exposure to the extra imposts. This week (ends Jan 7) the recently privatised State Bank of NSW fell in to line with other banks with transaction charges for people whose accounts fall below $500. Further, it offered no exemptions for low-income groups.

The four major banks and now the State Bank (which in NSW and the ACT rates with them in customer accessibility) have a hotchpotch of fees which depend on numbers of transaction a month, the balance in the account and whether the transactions are electronic or over the counter. But there is a consistent pattern: fees are reduced if there is $500 in the account and fees are lower for electronic than personal transactions. It is true that this reflects the costs to the banks of running those accounts, but that just happens to coincide with hitting those least able to bear or defray the cost. Welfare recipients, for example, invariably get their money paid directly into an account, so they have to have bank accounts. Welfare recipients are usually not the sort of people who can afford to have $500 constantly in the bank to avoid the fees banks have started to charge for maintaining such and account _ between $2 and $2.50 a month. So it seems that welfare recipients are having a compulsory levy of up to 2 per cent taken from their pensions. It seems only a little, but for most pensioners it is the equivalent of the Medicare charge for income earners.
Continue reading “1995_01_january_leader07jan”

The economic recovery appears to be coming with a price on the road. As more people can afford to take holidays and as business activity increases more people are travelling. It appears that that may be resulting in more people dying or getting injured on the roads. But exactly why road tolls go up and down may be more complex than that. Fifty-seven people were killed on the road over Christmas-New Year and the 1994 toll in NSW was up 71 on the previous year. The ACT’s toll was up 30 per cent. In general, the statistics have shown a fairly continuous fall in road deaths in most parts of Australia over the past 10 years until very recently when it has been going up again. The notable exception has been Victoria whose toll in 1994 was 376, a record low and down 60 on the previous year. Victoria’s road toll is now less than 40 per cent of its high 25 years ago.

Obviously, statistics from individual states comparing specific years can be misleading, but there has now been a consistent theme that Victoria has done better than other places in Australia. Can the rest of Australia learn from this? The answer to that question is probably yes, provided law-makers, law-enforcers and road-users come to the question with open minds. The first points to make are that there is no simple answer and that Victoria does not have a magic trick that other states do not. But the Victorian approach over the past 20 years has had three elements not consistently present elsewhere: a willingness to innovate; constant attention to the problem and a recognition that results are best obtained by attacking the problem in many different ways at the same time.
Continue reading “1995_01_january_leader05jan”