Crispin Hull

The truth. The elusive truth. Everything else and the truth.

What is the truth, asks Nicholas Hasluck in his latest novel A Grain of Truth. A plaything of the legal system, perhaps.

This is Hasluck’s third novel set in the fictional west coast city of Blosseville. For Blosseville, read Perth.

As he wrote the game plan changed.
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Sydney town planner David Hain was appointed yesterday by Robert Landsdown to assist in the review he is conducting into residential redevelopment.

Submission to the review are due on Friday. Mr Landsdown said yesterday that he hoped to engage in some sort of public process as soon as posisble after submissions close and to report before the end of next month.
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The ACT has a new housing supremo.

Former first assistant secretary in the Department of Land, Environment and Planning Peter Guild started in the new job as general-manager of ACT Housing yesterday.

He said his main aim is to carry out the Hilmer report recommendation to separate the asset management of public housing from the social objectives of the Government.

Mr Guild had been head of land management at DELP since 1989. Moiya Haynes is now acting in that position and John Thwaites, from Parks and Conservation, is acting her position in lease administration.
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The move by Gareth Evans from the House of Unrepresentative Swill to the House of Representatives shows one of the defects in the federal single-member electoral system _ the seatless Minister.

It is a defect the Germans and Americans have overcome and the New Zealanders imagine they might overcome.

The seatless-Minister defect arises because each member of the Ministry in the House of Representatives has to win a seat which is based locally not nationally _ a constituency seat if you like.
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The results of the Canberra Times Datacol poll during the week show us that we will have to get used to minority governments in the ACT and a higher-than-average level support for independents than elsewhere in Australia.

This need be no bad thing. Indeed, looking back over the three years there have been some major pluses with minority government. In a word, it has meant a clear separation between the legislative function of government and the executive function and it has meant the executive has had to be genuinely accountable to the Parliament.

This has been evidenced in several ways. Numerous small changes to government legislation, often for the better, have been passed that would otherwise have been squashed by a government rubber-stamp treatment of the Assembly. A range of non-government legislation that would otherwise have been lost causes have at least been discussed if not passed. And one minister has been held accountable to the Assembly in a true Westminster way that Federal and other-state experience suggests would not have happened otherwise. Wayne Berry was held accountable for his misstatements to the Assembly over Vitab.
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No-one mentioned yesterday the glorious Canberra spring day or the cloudless blue sky normally essential ingredients to the opening of Floriade. It would have been impolite in the face of the drought ravaging an already Canberra-detesting bushfolk.

The Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett, opened Floriade saying it had attracted more than half a million visitors and $30 million worth of business last year and would attract more this year. There will be approximately one bulb per person. This year 581,300 bulbs have been planted and 215,000 annuals. This year Floriade is contaminated by a native-plants section with subtle Australian flora competing with the gaudy European imports 286,000 tulips, 103,000 daffodils, 100,000 Ipheion/Tritelia, and 27,000 Hyacinths. The major sponsor of the four-week event is the Advance Bank. Ms Follett said the bank’s support and that of 13 other public and private-sector sponsors had enabled the event to remain free.

The ACT should have compulsory bottle deposit legislation, the ACT Conservation Council said yesterday.

The call follows support for deposit legislation in NSW by the Waste Crisis Network which says the packaging and soft-drink industry is supporting the “”Do The Right Thing” campaign with $1 million a year on condition that compulsory deposits are not introduced.

The executive director of the ACT Conservation Council, Craig Darlington, said container deposits were common until the 1970s when manufacturers worked out they could make more profit from non-reusable containers.
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Coombs economics is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The 1980s saw economics rise as an end in itself. The remnants of that thinking are still with us. We report economic statistics in an “”end-in-itself” way. We say the national accounts figure this quarter is good or the current account deficit figure this month is bad. It is as if the economics statistics and indicators themselves are good or bad in a moral sense and therefore are capable of measuring the goodness of our society.

Nugget Coombs comes from a generation of economists who saw economics as merely a means to an end. Moreover, the end was stated, and stated in a social context, especially full employment.

Coombs is now 88. He spends half his year in Canberra and the other half in Darwin _ sensibly avoiding Canberra’s winter and Darwin’s Wet.
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Charlie started work at Murray Breweries in Beechworth three days before World War I ended when the school-leaving age was 13. I mention this because it was World Clean-up Day on Sunday.

I joined Murray Breweries on a school-holiday job in 1968. Then it had ceased to be a brewery and was, and still is a soft-drink factory. Charlie had only a couple of years to go until retirement. He had worked there for 50 years. He was, indeed, part of the machinery. Charlie stood at a circular machine putting empty bottles in one end with his right hand. They went around being filled by cordial, water and then gas and he took them out with his left hand.

My job was at the other end of the factory. We worked from 6am till 6pm with half an hour for lunch for $27.50 a week. Me and another bloke who had left school for the job sorted used bottles: screw tops, crown tops, labels, ceramic-embossed, large medium and small, putting each into separate reusable wooden crates hour after hour.
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No man is an island” came to mind as the ACT Government was forced twice recently to announce changes to tax regimes in the face of competitive pressure from NSW.The first was payroll tax and the second was registration and licence arrangements for tourist mini-bus operations. Businesses would move or set up elsewhere unless the tax reductions were made. Of course, it also required a little publicity before a looming election.

If the ACT did not cut the taxes it would take only a few deserters to eat away any revenue advantage of a higher tax, leaving aside the public odium of having a higher tax.

Competitive federalism’s most strident example came when the Bjelke-Petersen Government in Queensland abolished death duties in the 1970s and all other states were forced to follow.
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