1994_01_january_leader07jaa

Australian Institute of Criminology’s Australian Prison Trends is a depressing publication. It shows an increasing imprisonment rate in Australia over the past two decades, and an even more pronounced increase in the early 1990s. Even more depressing is the fact that more than half of imprisonments were because people failed to pay fines, many of them traffic fines. It shows there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.

In 1976 the imprisonment rate was 90.9 people per 100,000. By 1992 it had risen to 108.8 per 100,000. And the rate of female imprisonment has gone up, too.

Precisely what these figures show is open to interpretation. It could be simplistically argued that there is more crime, therefore more imprisonment is needed. It could be equally argued that the recession means fewer people can pay fines therefore more imprisonment is needed.
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1994_01_january_leader06jan

Treasurer, Ralph Willis, faces a difficult half year. He will have to balance some strongly competing interests to ensure the Australian economy remains on the recovery path. His essential dilemma arises out of the very nature of the recovery.

Company profits and the share market are rising strongly (perhaps too strongly). Consumer and business confidence is improving as is business investment, though less vigorously. Meanwhile, unemployment remains static. Employment is always last to recover. So the Government’s high recession-driven social-welfare demands are not abating. In satisfying them, the Government has to spend. Yet high government spending can jeopardise the fragile recovery. With a high budgetary deficit the Government has to borrow. This in turn puts pressure on interest rates and inflation. To date the good interest and inflation environment has underpinned whatever recovery there has been. Take them away and the recovery is endangered.

The task for Mr Willis and his colleagues, therefore, is to meet the needs of unemployed and others affected by the recession without allowing the deficit to run at recession levels, indeed they must sure it is reined in. Further, they must resist the temptation to skim off any of the budgetary self-correction for pet programs. The budgetary self-correction is where receipts rise and spending of their own accord without any policy changes as the country comes out of recession. Increased business activity causes higher taxes and more employment meaning lower social security payments.

There is some evidence that the receipts side of self-correction is under way; they are much higher at this stage of the year than was forecast in the August Budget. The spending side of self-correction, however, is some way off. As the receipts come in, the temptation is for the Government to spend them with make-work schemes and the like, or to relax the pressure to control spending on general programs.

The May Budget presents a great opportunity for the Government so send an early confidence-boosting message that it will resist this temptation. However, the May Budget also presents a potential pitfall. The reason for bringing the Budget forward to May was to enable businesses to take Budget changes into account in their planning for the financial year beginning in June. Let us hope that was the real reason and not that the Government would get the advantage of a full year's revenue in any changes it made to tax.

At this fragile stage of the recovery, the Government needs to refrain from imposing extra costs on business, continue the drive for public-sector efficiency, seriously question the worth of some government programs and to look again at the tax mix. The last of these is politically the most difficult. Any attempt to reduce the taxes on jobs (payroll) and exports (wholesale tax) and increase the taxes on consumption will be snapped up by the Opposition as hypocrisy in the light of the Government's attack on the GST last election. None the less, the Government must seriously look at the tax mix as part of its Budgetary strategy.

As it works towards the May Budget (and departments are doing that right now) the Government should seize the opportunity which it correctly created by using it as an impetus to confidence, business investment and the growth that will create jobs and avoid the pitfall of increasing tax and spending which can only do the opposite. The fragile recovery has to be nurtured, not nipped in the bud.

1994_01_january_leader06jaa

Week saw two fatal shootings by police in Victoria. It will be some time before any definite conclusions can be drawn, whether police acted properly or whether some changes to police training and procedures are needed. Police made the point that the shootings were unrelated. Superficially, that may be the case. One was in Shepparton and one was in Melbourne. However, there were some similarities. Both victims were mentally unstable and beyond the control of those around them. Any inquiry should look at the extent to which mental-health policies contributed to the two situations. The policies over the past decade, notably in Victoria, of closing mental hospitals and putting the mentally unstable out into the community without at the same time providing accessible, professional help for times of crisis appear to have come seriously unstuck. The failure of these policies was well documented in the Burdekin report. It is too early to judge these cases, but it would in unwise to exclude that line of inquiry. It would also be worth inquiring into the extent to which the police are left to deal with the mentally ill in a crisis and whether that is appropriate. In the absence of other resources, however, it appears that relatives and others dealing with the mentally ill often have no other choice.

The other issue is police training in general in dealing with the potentially violent. Regrettable as the deaths are, it has to be recognised that any police officer facing a violent, dangerous person will be making decisions under considerable stress and virtually instantly. It is too easy for others to judge in hindsight with additional facts to available to the police at the time. Police officers are entitled to put the safety of the public and themselves before the safety of an armed person posing a threat to life and limb.
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1994_01_january_leader04jan

ONE OF the major goals of 1993 for the ACT Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett, was the establishment of a separate ACT Public Service. It did not happen.

At present nearly all the employees who serve the ACT polity are in effect Federal Public servants. Given the wide, almost sovereign powers of the ACT legislature, executive and judiciary, a separate ACT Public Service makes sense. Employees in it will have their first loyalties to the ACT and will not constantly be viewing their careers in a Federal context.

The ACT can never be fully sovereign and never be completely like the states because the Federal Parliament, Government and Australians in general have obvious permanent interests in the ACT which transcend the local legislature and the people who elected it. None the less, given the broad legislative powers invested in the Legislative Assembly, a separate service to administer and execute the laws it makes would complete the self-government process.

It should give an opportunity to make much-needed improvements in public administration in the ACT. The evidence to date shows some severe problems with the present hybrid set-up. Significantly, these short-comings were found by one officer who is answerable directly to the ACT Assembly _ the Auditor-General. The short-comings should be profoundly embarrassing. The audited reports of the ACT Treasury, Attorney-General’s Department, Chief Minister’s, Urban Services , Housing and Community Services and ACTION were qualified. In other words, the financial reports of the bulk of the ACT public sector were unsatisfactory. The auditor found many other short-comings in various parts of the service.
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1994_01_january_lawyear

1993 was the year of the direct attack.

In previous years the typical “”yearender” on the law would look at reforms to reduce costs and delays and look through the main cases, especially those of the High Court.

This year the law itself and its administration has taken back seat to the practitioners themselves _ not only lawyers, but judges as well.

The attacks have come from many different quarters for several different reasons.

The most vehement have been, for want of a better epithet, the gender-based attacks. Judges who were seen to denigrate women, especially in violence cases, came under fire from politicians, community leaders and the legal profession itself.
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1994_01_january_column10jan

This letter is a bit of an effrontery because I am going to offer you a solution to the Northern Ireland problem when I don’t have any experience in foreign affairs or diplomacy. However, when one looks at what the people with experience in foreign affairs and diplomacy have done, I don’t think it is a disqualification.

The first thing is you must stop announcing policy with words that mean different things to each side.

Talking about “”self-determination, freely and concurrently given, north and south” is plain silly. Ian Paisley and intractable mob of Protestant Unionists think this means that there will be no governmental changes in Northern Ireland without consent of a majority of the people in Northern Ireland. As there are more Protestants than Catholics he thinks he is safe. Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein (Ted Heath would call them the acceptable face of the IRA), on the other hand, think that “”self-determination” means a vote of the whole of Ireland, north and south, and thus there will be union.
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1994_01_january_column03jan

Are nearly all dead now, more’s the pity. Certainly, they have all long retired.

These are the people who made the self-serving, short-sighted, foolish and out-of-touch decisions in Cabinet 30 years ago. Under the 30-year rule, the ministerial Cabinet submissions of 1963 were made public on January 1, 1994.

We learn of a Minister outlining the electoral advantage for the Menzies Government if Aborigines were counted at census time as ultimately came about in the 1967 referendum. By counting them, the conservative states of Western Australia and Queensland might each get an extra seat. We learn that Cabinet rejected a ban on tobacco advertising despite the obvious evidence of tobacco’s dangers because Australian tobacco growers would lose. We learn of a pompous plan to put a 100-metre Westminster-style tower on the shore of Lake Burley Griffin. We see how the Menzies Government knew that Australia would be made a nuclear target by allowing the joint-US North-West Cape naval communications base to be built, but agreed anyway. And we see how none of the sycophantic Cabinet raised a word of protest before Menzies announced that the new unit of decimal currency would be called the Royal. Only when it was laughed out court, so to speak, in the pubs and cafes did anyone come back to Cabinet with something more in touch with popular sentiment.
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1993_12_december_column7

Was hardly enough room at the Bar table in No 1 courtroom at the High Court that day.

It was in 1982 or perhaps 1983. Every state, the Commonwealth and the plaintiff was represented by a QC and a junior, all in silk, stuff and horsehair. On the Bench six of the seven judges wore gowns and wigs. Justice Murphy, sensibly did not wear one. In all, there were nearly two dozen players in full theatrical costume, enough to put on a Shakespearean comedy _ Much Ado About Nothing would have been appropriate for what was about to unfold.

In measured tones, the tobacco company’s QC began his attack on what he called unconstitutional taxes on tobacco products by state governments.

At that stage state governments had been imposing taxes in various guises on alcohol for a quarter of a century and taxes on tobacco and petrol for some time.
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1993_12_december_column13

Are colonising more and more occupations. At first they dealt only with scientific data, then big-scale data, then words and then small accounts.

In 1979 the first visual display terminals came to The Canberra Times. Within a short time computers killed off one profession and colonised another. There are now virtually no typesetters and no typing pools. That occupation is killed off, and another occupation, the journalists who create the words, are colonised. Much the same thing has happened in accounting. Once there were those who repetitively keyed in figures and on the other hand those who manipulated and interpreted those figures. Now those two groups have been fused. Those who solely practised the repetitive task have been killed off (occupationally) and the rest have been colonised.

Lawyers firms, too, are being taken. Government departments have succumbed, though more slowly. And nearly all of academia has been colonised by the beige boxes. Many meetings have been replaced by electronic mail.
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1993_12_december_column20

It may prod people into being more active about territorial affairs.

The addition of party voting to the Robson-Hare-Clark system approved in last year’s referendum is a bit like adding an office block to a wilderness so people have a wider choice of scenery. Great office block. Pity about the wilderness.

However, it may be a blessing. Let me explain. The eight other Australian polities (six states, the Commonwealth and the Northern Territory) only have to deal with apathy. The ACT has to deal with not only apathy, but a more corrosive political snobbery. In the other polities a large mass of people are content to measure out their lives in soap operas and sport. But those polities at least have a stratum of professionals, socially active people, academics and the like who do care about government and get involved.

Not so in the ACT. From the earliest days of self-government the cream of Canberra professionally and intellectually took great pride in professing ignorance of and disdain for affairs of the local Assembly. They kept their eyes on national affairs.
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