Crispin Hull

ABOUT THE POLL – Federal Politicians

Method : Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI).

Date : Saturday 13 August 1994 to Tuesday 13 September 1994.

Sample : Simple random sample from the Canberra Telephone Directory 1994

The Questions
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There is a piece about databases in ba dives that can be used. if no room for this hold out hold out.) Pars end with (have lost q/l for now)There were thousands and thousands of thin red and white coated twisted copper wires. Two of those pairs were mine and they were not behaving themselves.

That was Friday inside the bowels of the Civic Telephone Exchange, but the story starts before then.

It starts with a shiny new Banksia modem which came in one of those video covers. It had the words Fax Modem on it. And the letters PCMCIA (presumably the post-Cold War US secret service is now usefully making fax modems). Anyway, it is a state of the art, matchbox sized modem that slots into a notebook computer and enables you to send text and faxes down the phone line.
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The Australian National University’s proposal to charge $9000 for the nine-month Legal Workshop course is most welcome. Not because it is a worthwhile proposal, quite the contrary, but because it will stir up much needed debate about the whole nature of legal education in Australia and the whole nature of university funding.

Two decades ago, courses like Legal Workshop were set up around Australian university law schools to give a period of practical legal education after four or five years of Socratic, academic education leading to the Bachelor of Laws degree.

Before that, law graduates did a year or so as an articled clerk or “”read” with a barrister for a year or so before become eligible to practise.
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This week a respected authority on land tenure in the ACT, Justice Rae Else-Mitchell, called for freehold to replace leasehold in the ACT. His conclusion may be impractical. But the fact that he came to such a radical conclusion indicates a belief that the present land tenure system has gone seriously off the rails.

Since self-government in 1989 there has been a feeling of the way, a groping in the dark. First the draft Territory Plan got a thorough work-over and became the Territory Plan. Since it has been in force there have been screams from all over town that the 50-50 infill-greenfields policy is causing heartache for existing residents and the government has embraced it as an article of faith without any economic or social underpinning.

And the logic of infill in the fringe suburb of Banks (before they have even got fill or infrastructure to be used let alone under-used) has yet to be explained by the Member for Brindabella and Minister for Environment, Land and Planning, Bill Wood.
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The scene is a Federal Court hearing room in Civic this week. It is used for commercial causes, so the public area consists of a few chairs along the back wall.

The judge has not arrived.

A good-looking man in his late thirties turns from chatting airily with his lawyers walks across to the other side of the court to a man sitting on one of the public chairs. He is an ACTTAB official.

“”My dear, Bruce, how are you?” the good-looking one says. “”I am so sorry we meet again in such strained circumstances.”

Some further pleasantries are exchanged.
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Cities in the developed world had a multiplier effect that could threaten the biosphere, according to the winning entry in the Jerrabomberra ideas competition announced yesterday.

“”What happens, or fails to happen, in the urban areas of the technologically developed countries may well be decisive for the future of the biosphere,” it said. “”there is the direct impact that the urban areas themselves make on the environment [and] there is the massive multiplier effect that occurs through the leadership role model they provide for the burgeoning urbanisation processes in the less developed countries.”

The winners of the $50,000 competition were announced by the Minister for Environment Land and Planning, Bill Wood, at Exhibition Park in Canberra.
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A Canberra businessman was given a 99-year lease over Ginninderra Village by the Department of Environment, Land and Planning for tens of thousands of dollars under its present market value, according to documents received by The Canberra Times.

The lease was converted from a 50-year lease under which rent is paid. At the time the businessman owed back-rent of more than $100,000.

The businessman, Mike St Clair, got the 99-year lease for $70,000, yet three sub-leases of businesses at the site show a return $75,000 a year.

Mr St Clair said yesterday that he had had a verbal understanding in 1982 with the then Minister for Territories, Michael Hodgman, that if he took up a short-term lease with rent on Ginninderra Village he would get a rent-free 99-year lease (like the standard residential lease) at market value the following year.
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All applications for lease variations and subsequent approvals will be tabled in the Assembly quarterly, the Minister for Environment, Land and Planning, Bill Wood, announced yesterday.The announcement comes after revelations in The Canberra Times this week that a 99-year lease had been granted to a Canberra businessman over Ginninderra Schoolhouse and surrounds for $70,000 even though there were sub-leases bringing in $75,000 a year.

Mr Wood said, however, that that lease variation had been handled correctly and in the best interests of the Territory.

Mr Wood had approved of the Ginninderra lease after a departmental submission that argued the businessman, Mike St Claire, had been led to believe he would get the lease in 1984 and therefore should have it at 1984 valuation and that good administration and encouragement of private enterprise had led to similar conversions in the past.
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ACT TAB dividends went into a tizz yesterday after the Federal Court’s injunction that resulted in the link with the Victorian superpool.

It is early days, but there is some pattern, and in the longer term, it may be that the small mug punter is better off under the new arrangements.

In all, though, the system should suit the mug, small-time punter.
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This will test the states’ role in that grey area between public good, privacy and censorship.

And there could be some interesting unintended consequences with the proposal by the Federal Attorney-General, Michael Lavarch, to provide a federal-law privacy shield against state and territory criminal prosecution over things done in the home.

The difficulty for the states is that the creation of the erotic or violent material occurs within the home. Before it hits the home computer, it is merely electronic bleeps. Before it is transmogrified in the home, it is stored as a computer file of a series of ones and zeroes.

Computer bulletin boards will make regulators think about what they are doing and why they are doing it. Bulletin boards are fundamentally different from earlier forms of distribution. And the difference pushes their use closer to private acts which in recent times (Tasmania excepted) the state has turned a blind eye and away from the more public acts of sale and hire that the state has taken some interest in.
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