Crispin Hull

ACT Electricity and Water called on Canberrans yesterday to voluntarily conserve water, saying that at present consumption rates compulsory restrictions would apply on Thursday.

Those restrictions would ban outside use of water on pain of a maximum $5000 fine for individuals or $25,000 for corporations.

They would be the first water restrictions in Canberra for more than 20 years.

The water shortage is being caused by bans by ACTEW engineers on the treating of water in protest at the ACT Government’s move to bring ACTEW under its Public Sector Management Bill.
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ACT Government has moved to replace the board of the ACT TAB, according to racing and other sources.

A special Cabinet meeting has been called for this morning to appoint chartered accountant Bruce Glanville as chairman and two other members, solicitor Elizabeth Bradley and the head of the Department of Sport Mark Owens, who is a former secretary of the ACT Racing Club.

The reports could not be confirmed officially last night and none of the new board members could be contacted directly last night.

The fate of the chief executive, Phillip Neck, is in the hands of the new board. It is expected though that the board will recommend to the Minister for Sport, David Lamont, that he be replaced.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_vitab10”

The ACT Government is the most ideologically left-wing government in the western world, according to the Leader of the Opposition, Alexander Downer.

No matter which party was in power, the days of the Federal Government being the source of wealth and growth for the ACT were over, he said on a visit to the CT Legislative Assembly yesterday.

The ACT had to put out the welcoming mat to business if it was to prosper.

He said, however, that there would be no public service bashing by him and that he had a great deal of respect for public servants.
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Two independents and the Leader of the Opposition, Kate Carnell, issued yesterday a joint statement calling for the immediate release of the report by Professor Dennis Pearce into the Vitab affair.

“”We are concenred that you have permitted your staff or senior bureaucrats to selectively leak information to the media about Professor Pearce’s findings,” they said.

The inquiry was publicly funded and the people of Canberra are entitled to its early release.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_vitab07”

At the heart of the VITAB affair is a question. Was this proposal a genuine foray into the Asian betting market by ACTTAB after receiving a proposal from a company that had secured a betting licence in Vanuatu? Or was the VITAB proposal totally underwritten by a couple of Australian syndicates of big smart punters sick of having to beat the 15 per cent government take before it can make a profit? Why not go off-shore where the government take and overhead costs are lower and the returns higher?

Pearce shows ACTTAB was naive, too enthusiastic and starry-eyed at the presence of the Great Punter Bob Hawke. He shows, too, that the VITAB directors were smart in insisting on a confidentiality agreement which would cut off some of its and the department’s avenues of inquiry.

But why did they fall for it? Because they were bureaucratic babes in a commercial wood. Why did VITAB go for it? Because the prize was big: access to wealth generated by government monopoly and prohibition that would not otherwise be there.
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After years of fighting in the courts and paying lawyers millions of dollars, Microsoft and Stac have agreed to kiss and make up.

The story so far: Stac Electronics clever programmers worked out a way to get a personal computer to shrink files to less than half their size for storage on the hard disk and explode them to normal on use. This included program files.

It meant that with this program people could store twice as much on their hard disk, thus postponing the expensive day of replacing the hard-disk with a bigger on.

Microsoft thought it was so good that it ought to have such a program on its next version of DOS to give users an extra reason to upgrade. For many people the program was the only reason to upgrade. A new version of DOS at $99 is cheaper than a new hard disk at $400.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_upgrad27”

The opposition to the ugly mobile-phone telecommunications towers continues. Now Queanbeyan Council is seeking legal advice about what can be done to make the telecommunications companies less gung-ho.

After Canberra protests about the towers, Planning Minister Bill Wood approached the Federal Government to see what could be done. It was generally thought that nothing could be done because Commonwealth telecommunications law broadly said that the companies could put their towers where they liked irrespective of territory or state planning law.

However, the ACT unlike anywhere else in Australia has some Commonwealth Planning law called the Australian Capital Territory Planning and Land Management Act. This sets up the National Capital Planning Authority which has drawn up a plan which has been approved by Parliament and has the force of law.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_comp20”

Banasonic has launched a gadget to display three-dimensional things on a video screen. It is good for displaying small items of medical apparatus, electronic gadgets, tools or any product at all to large audiences. It has the advantage over displaying photographic images of an item because you can move your product around during your presentation.

You can swing the unit’s cameras around to take images off the wall. ($6399 02 9867569).

The information super-highway is like the Holy Roman Empire, which was described as not being an empire, hardly at all Roman and certainly not holy.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_upgrad20”

The Opposition accused the Government of presenting an election Budget and doing nothing to reduce over-spending in areas noted by the Grants Commission.

It said the deficit was really $64 million, to be funded by reserves $28 million and borrowings of $36 million. The Government was now committed to borrow $212 million over five years.

Revenue was up $11 million this financial year, though the Government had said it would fall.

The Opposition finance spokesman, Trevor Kaine, said the program of 2 per cent across the board “”efficiencies” had been mindless. It was better to target cuts.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_comment”

I AM glad that lawyer Jack Pappas has volunteered to break my arm and watch “”bear the pain and suffering like a man”, because it gives me a chance to revisit the third-party motor insurance debate.

For a change, I was basically supportive of the Law Society’s position that it would be a mistake to replace common-law damages with a capped, part-administrative scheme as in many states. Such schemes invariably are worse for the catastrophically injured, especially those on medium and high incomes with families to support (yes, they have rights, too).

Something has to give in the third-party equation. The reserves will be chewed up soon, so either premiums will have to rise, or benefits fall. Politicians, being politicians, will avoid inflicting broad-based pain like increased premiums when they can inflict pian on a disparate, nebulous group like those who might be injured in future car accidents.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_column28jun”