Crispin Hull

ACT planners were about to denigrate a significant national cultural site, according to the Canberra Conservation Council.

The council pleaded yesterday for the preservation and restoration of the Tuggeranong Homestead and surrounds where Charles Bean wrote the Gallipoli volumes of the Australian official history of World War I. The council opposed the development of housing near the homestead and opposed the conversion of the permitted land use on the homestead and surrounds to commercial which would permit a Federation Square-type development.

“”This is the spot where Bean’s two volumes on Gallipoli _ an episode which has a unique position in Australian history _ was penned,” the president of the council, Jacqui Rees, said. “”It is incongruous in the extreme that such a place is to be draped with vistas of intruding paling fences and drying washing.”
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Top ALP officials were advised to offer help to companies when they sought funds before election campaigns, according to documents obtained by üThe Canberra Times@ yesterday.

The documents also show how lobbyists successfully watered down anti-tobacco health proposals using tactics that “”would make interesting reading in book form”.

The documents, mainly in the form of card indexes, show details of ALP approaches to major companies before the 1980, 1983 and 1987 elections. The indexes were kept by lobbyist and ALP fund-raiser Charles Wright.

Mr Wright was appointed chair of the ACT Tourism Advisory Board earlier this year. The appointment was attacked by the Opposition in the ACT Legislative Assembly last week. Liberal MLAs cited his directorship of a company that went into receivership owing group tax and the Government and his mention in the WA Inc Royal Commission as being a conduit for former Premier Brian Burke to pay Mr Burke’s former secretary Brenda Brush $80,000.
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He chair of the ACT Tourism Board, Charles Wright, led a charmed life or had a guardian angel with respect to his taxation affairs, Liberal Senator Bronwyn Bishop said at a Senate Estimates Committee meeting yesterday.

The Minister for Administrative Services, Senator Bob McMullan, accused Senator Bishop of a scandalous misuse of parliamentary privilege to sully Mr Wright’s reputation.

Also yesterday, the Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett, stood by her appointment of Mr Wright as chair of the Tourism Advisory Board while the Leader of the Opposition, Kate Carnell, called for him to stand aside pending an inquiry.
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A sensitive Cape York freehold property is expected to be passed back to the traditional Aboriginal owners tomorrow (Monday) under a purchase agreement from Lloyd’s Bank.

The case of the Line Hill property follows two other major land-rights/development disputes on Cape York: one mining the other tourist.

Two Aboriginal representatives, Rodney Accoom and Fred Moses, with their lawyer John Bottoms are on their way to Sydney to sign the purchase agreement.

Mr Bottoms said yesterday that in view of Mabo and of previous court proceedings he was pleased that Lloyd’s Bank, the mortgagee in possession, was able to negotiate with the traditional owners for a purchase agreement.
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The ACT minority Government is assured of getting its Budget through the Legislative Assembly following a commitment yesterday by two Independents.

Michael Moore and Helen Szuty said their position was different from the Greens and the Democrats in the Federal Senate who with the Opposition forced a changed to some Budget measures.

Mr Moore and Ms Szuty said that before the last election they had given a commitment to guarantee supply and appropriation to the Government and not to move a no-confidence motion in the Chief Minister. The Federal Democrats and Greens had given no such promise.
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Whenever you hear your favourite warm and cuddly ACT Minister utter the word “”consultation” freeze.

Go back over the sentence and ask what does it really mean. “”Consultation” is the buzz word. Nothing happens without consultation. Well, last week the ACT Government got caught.

The story starts a year ago when the Minister for Idle Youth, Terry Connolly, noted seething masses of drunken, smoking yobs crowding the bars and clubs of Canberra, mostly in upstairs or downstairs hideaways with narrow entrances.

He quite rightly asked: what if there were a fire? The youth would fry. Something had to be done. A law had to be passed.
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The Opposition’s fossilised response the ACT Budget got only half the story.

Kate Carnell called it the Jurrasic Park Budget _ a simile that is destined for clichedom over its next 160 million uses. She was comparing the ACT Government to another extinct lifeform _ Stalinism. While other governments were adapting and privatising the unfit ACT Government was batting on with State ownership of property and the means of production and exchange, she said.

Carnell could have used the Jurrasic Park analogy to better effect. Quite recently palaeontologists grovelling in the Badlands of Wyoming discovered an unknown attribute of dinosaurs: they were social animals which lived in groups and nurtured their young after hatching.
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Molonglo, Brindabella and Ginninderra were confirmed in the Gazette yesterday as the names for the three electorates for the ACT Legislative Assembly.

It rejected the name Namadgi for the southern seat, saying it could not authenticate it as an Aboriginal name.

The boundaries were also confirmed. The confirmation came from the augmented ACT Electoral Commission which hears final objections after the earlier publication of the Redistribution Committee’s findings.

Those findings stand. Ginninderra (five seats) will comprise Belconnen and Hall. Brindabella (five seats) will comprise Tuggeranong and the Woden suburbs of Torrens, Pearce and Chifley and the southern remainder of the ACT. Molonglo (seven seats) will comprise North and South Canberra, Gungahlin, Weston Creek and Woden (exclusing Torrens, Chiefley and Pearce).
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Add pars to hospice story…..cut in as you can.

The Minister for Heatlh, Wayne Berry, denounced the decsions as outrageous and obstructionist.

The NCPA had rejected the ACT’s first choice of site and then had put up technical objections to its other choice on the QEII site in Civic.
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What a delight to see politicians thinking more than three years ahead.

When the federal executive dumped on the ACT branch of the ALP yesterday it had little to do with the pre-selection of sitting members of the ACT Legislative Assembly. And little, indeed, to do with sitting Federal Members. The real issue was pre-selection for the third ACT federal seat which, according to present population trends, must be created before the next election.

Now the third seat will almost inevitably an ALP one. Mr Gerry Mander himself would have difficulty weaving a boundary line through Red Hill, Forest and Weetangera to form a Tory seat. John Haslem won Canberra for the Liberals in 1975 in the anti-Gough landslide and then retained it having proved himself the local Member par excellence in 1977. But it was a two-election wonder. The ACT is a Labor stronghold.
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