Crispin Hull

The ACT is a vulnerable little polity. And to do well in this grim competitive Federation our government has to be smart. If it is dumb, the citizens pay.

The TAB fiasco shows how vulnerable the ACT is in the face of the big states. This week another fiscal Achilles heel has been revealed: compulsory third-party car insurance. This insurance covers drivers at fault who are sued for causing personal injury.

This week’s announced $18-a-week increase to apply from July 8 is a trivial inconvenience compared to what might happen in the future.

The increase brings premiums to $178 per car per year. The NRMA says the real cost is $266. The balance is being paid by eating into reserves. That sounds like a typical ACT Government policy in the face of a looming February election: don’t upset the natives with a bit of fiscal responsibility. To the Government’s credit, however, it has put out an issues paper on what should be done. To the community’s discredit, the response has been negligible.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_thirdpty”

THE police did not arrive at The Canberra Times with a search warrant at the weekend.

Odd that, because on Page 1 of Saturday’s paper was an article about the as yet unpublished Vitab report leaked from a “”government source”.

Now, two years ago when someone leaked some health budget material which The Canberra Times published, the government got a search warrant and a couple of cops turned over a desk or two and found nothing.

Why no police this time? Could it be because the “”government source” was doing the government’s bidding in putting the government in a good light.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_column04jun”

There are only 14 shopping days until the end of the financial year.

Should you buy a new computer or upgrade your existing one, or its software?

To maximise your tax advantage it is a good time to upgrade _ just before the financial year. This is particularly true this year because the investment allowance cuts out at the end of this financial year.

That is the swing. What about the roundabout? Well, everyone is upgrading or buying now. So it is a sellers’ market and there are fewer crazy deals around. In Canberra it is worse. All those Government Departments are looking for ways to off-load any spare cash at the end of the financial year lest the Department of Finance takes it off them or gives them less next year. What better way to waste the taxpayers’ money than buying a whole lot of computer junk?
Continue reading “1994_06_june_taxcomp”

It is to be business as usual for one of Canberra’s leading building and land-development companies, Consolidated Builders Ltd, after the election of a new five-person board of directors, which included two from the old board.

The company’s solicitor, Bernard Collaery, said yesterday that shareholders had agreed on Thursday night to have a five-member board of directors, rather than four, as recommended by a committee of inquiry into the company.

The committee had criticised three of four former directors for administrative irregularities and for buying land for themselves in Queensland near land they had bought on behalf of the company.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_build3”

The Deputy Chief Minister and Minister for Sport, David Lamont, said yesterday that it would have been remiss of him as a minister not to have dismissed the ACT TAB board last Friday.

The Canberra Times has copies of letters between him and the board’s chair, Athol Williams, showing Mr Lamont refused to give the board collectively or its legal advisers copies of the Pearce report into the Vitab affair upon which the dismissals were based.

Mr Lamont said that after receiving the report he had got advice from the Chief Government Solicitor. If he had not acted he would have left himself open to the allegation that he had not acted responsibly.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_tabsack”

At one stage it nearly hit $60 million, but has been steadily reduced since self-government. Last year it was $44.7 million and this year it will be $39.8 million.

However, $250,000 of that can be put down to the deferral of the bus replacement program. That deferral will save $10.6 million on the capital account.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_budtran”

An the ACT TAB become the mouse that roared. With the end of the arrangement with pooling arrangement with Victoria looming, the ACT appears it will have to grovel to NSW to get a pooling arrangement. But the ACT is not without some ammunition, albeit highly risky stuff.

Without a pooling arrangement ACTTAB, according to Professor Dennis Pearce’s report, will not be viable under present circumstances.

First to background.

TABs in Australia turn over nearly $9 billion a year (a little under the defence budget). State Governments take about $900 million or 10 per cent, handing some of that to the racing industry. About $450 million (5 per cent) goes in overheads. The remaining 85 per cent goes back to punters. The betting pool on each race is divided this way and the return to punters is calculated (italic) after (end italic) each race is run (unlike bookies).
Continue reading “1994_06_june_taboped”

If you do not have the money for pet projects you have to beg, borrow or steal it. The ACT is trying to do all three. It has successfully begged from the Federal Government and it is going to borrow, which is tantamount to stealing from future generations.

Begging is a fairly public event, but the stealing from future generations has to be covered up or at least disguised. And that is precisely what has happened.

This year’s and last year’s Budget papers are quite open on the begging issue and reveal how successful the ACT Government has been at it. Last year it predicted Commonwealth payments to the ACT would be $533. As it happened the Commonwealth came up with an extra $41 million. Perhaps the ACT does matter after all, especially in the context of Federal Labor having six our of eight second-tier governments held by their conservative opponents and an election in February for Federal Labor’s most friendly face around the COAG table.

(Incidentally, I have been trying to come up with a shorthand for state and territory governments without ignoring the territories. Better suggestions than second-tier will be gratefully received and fed into the Australian language through these columns.)
Continue reading “1994_06_june_budforum”

The decisive and secretive wholesale dismissal of the board and chief executive of the ACT TAB in the past two days does not sit well with the high ideals of the Government’s own Public Sector Management Bill.

One of those ideals was that all ACT public-sector employees would come under the Bill. The TAB had only been left out initially because of the Vitab inquiry. Another was that public sector employees would have certain protections, including due process before dismissal.

The chief executive of the TAB, Philip Neck, under the Government’s centralised new public-sector structure would have been the equivalent of a head of department. And under that structure the Government would not have been able to send him on his bike without a least a chance to put his case.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_tabcomm”

The United Nations should set up a formal Office of Creativity, according to the creator of the term “”lateral thinking”, Edward de Bono.

Dr de Bono said in an interview from London that the special UN office was needed “”to think about the problems which the UN hasn’t got the faintest idea how to deal with. Somalia, Bosnia and so on.”

His new book, Parallel Thinking, will be published tomorrow. In it he says, “”Western thinking is failing because its complacent arrogance prevents it from seeing the extent of its failure”.

He argues that many of the social and political problems of the world are approached on the basis that if you remove the cause the problem will be solved. This might work 60 per cent of the time, but in the other 40 the cause might not be able to be found, or it might be immovable (because it is human nature), he said. So different thinking was required to move forward.
Continue reading “1994_06_june_bononews”