Crispin Hull

Cross the South Australian-NSW border near Broken Hill something remarkable does not happen.

You do not change time zones. If you drive into Broken Hill, about 50km inside NSW, the clocks are all on South Australian time. Business opens and shuts at the same time as Adelaide.

If you leave Broken Hill and drive towards Canberra, after about 20km in dead flat country with virtually no habitation, you come to a sign telling you to wind your clock forward half and hour to NSW time.
Continue reading “1994_03_march_column28mar”

Stuart Littlemore sound like an opinionated, pompous git? I think it is a shame he has to sound like that, but I can understand why. It has nothing to do with his character. For all I know he might be a meek, self-effacing man in real life. But on television he cannot be like that.

(For the uninitiated, Littlemore presents Mediawatch, 15 minutes of ABC television that has journalists throughout Australia at the edge of their seats with delight at the pasting of disliked colleagues or fear of a pasting of themselves.)

In an age of concentrated media ownership where Packer Murdoch and three TV networks own virtually the lot, we need Littlemore and we could do with a few more of him. He is at his best when he highlights what he sees are journalists’ conflicts of interest: journalists’ whose writings co-incide with their employers’ interest or, worse, journalists who have direct interest in things they are plugging.

Last Monday, he got stuck into three writers on the Australian: Greg Sheridan, over a piece saying Indonesia is okay; Bryan Frith over a piece saying super-share schemes are okay and Paddy McGuinness over a piece saying smoking is okay. He then said Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Australian, has a business interest in all three things, the last because he is a director of Philip Morris.

Then (and this is when he sounds and looks most like the opinionated pompous git we have all come to love to hate) he concluded that in his opinion, it showed these three journalists were not behaving with independence but blowing their owners’ business trumpet.

Now, Littlemore is a Queen’s Counsel with an extensive knowledge of libel law. He well knows that to assert as fact that the three journalists had surrendered their independence to their master would be defamatory and could sound heavily in damages.
Continue reading “1994_03_march_column21mar”

Are seldom seen to be responsible — the in literal sense. Whenever a news editor quietly refuses to run a story, or cut some bits from it, or downplay it because it is violent, obscene, racist, likely to stir up violence, induce people to commit suicide or whatever, the public does not see this act of “”responsible behaviour”. It only sees the “”irresponsible”. The media are always being portrayed as “”irresponsible” for running this or that story.

But there is a danger here. At least when the “”irresponsible” story is run, people get a chance to make judgments about it. If the media were to become “”more responsible” as it is forever urged to be, the result could be quite dangerous. People in readerland would never know what the media are being “”responsible” about.

Take suicides for example. Most media rarely cover suicides because journalists know of the copycat syndrome. So for years we have “”responsibly” put suicide on the spike. The result has been a major social ill has not been given the attention in should get. There are dangers with a “”responsible” media.
Continue reading “1994_03_march_column14mar”

Paul Keating wants to get rid of the turbulent minorities in the Senate. Just as Henry hated his executive power being interfered with the turbulent priest Archbishop Thomas a’Becket in the 12th century, Keating hates the exercise of his executive power being questioned by the Senate. Just as Henry sent a few knightly thugs to murder a’Becket, Keating is musing with changing the Senate election system to rid himself of the turbulent Kernot.

His scheme, however, has some very high constitutional and practical hurdles.

At present the Senate is elected by proportional representation with each state as one electorate. In a half-Senate election for six senators, a candidate needs 14.3 per cent of the vote to get a seat, or a lot less if it is the last seat and preferences are counted. If it is a double-dissolution election for 12 senators a candidate needs only 7.7 per cent. It means minor parties are able to get seats.

Keating and the Government leader in the Senate, Gareth Evans, have mused about electing the Senate like the House of Representatives, on a single-member electorate basis. Essentially, only major parties win single-member seats. An alternative is to keep each state as a single electorate but change the voting system from preferential to first-past the post. Under that plan voters would mark six crosses and the six candidates with the most crosses would get seats, instead of marking them 1, 2, 3, etc as now. Once again only major party candidates would win seats.
Continue reading “1994_03_march_column06mar”

Chelmsford is Australia’s worst case of the deadly combination of lawyerisation and the culture of silence.

What I call lawyerisation is where people shovel money into lawyers at one end of the system to ensure there is no result at the other.

The culture of silence is the law that puts all the onus on person exercising the so-called right to speak freely. That onus is to prove the truth of every word uttered and to prove the truth of the an imputation that a lawyer might be able to extract from your words.

There is no onus on the silencers. There is no onus for them to prove they suffered damage.
Continue reading “1994_03_march_chelms”

On February 28, 1973, Barry Hart, then aged 37, walked into Chelmsford Private Hospital.

Two weeks later he woke up with double pnuemonia, pleuresy, deep vein thombosis and anoxic brain damage. He had been subjected to deep-sleep therapy and electric-shock treatment _ all against his will.

Most people think that the Chelmsford episode is closed, that a Royal Commission exposed the malpractice, that procedures were fixed, that victims compensated and that it could never happen again. Wrong.

Twenty-one years later Hart’s case is still in the courts. It took seven years to get it to court and it has been there for a further 14 years, with no end in sight.
Continue reading “1994_03_march_barry”

Developers are spending too much on promotion and not enough on design, according to the Minister for Environment, Land and Planning, Bill Wood.

The result has been some poor quality medium-density housing.

“”The design quality of some of our new homes is still not good enough,” he said yesterday (saty).

Developers and builders should recognise that good design is their best selling point, he said.

Canberra led Australia in its urban environment, but some medium-density housing had not been well done.
Continue reading “1994_03_march_archit”

Significant reforms have taken place in the Federal Parliament in the past four years, but last Thursday it was still a whiteboard jungle. Many of the reforms were hailed as major steps to lift the quality of debate in Parliament to produce meaningful Question Times.

The televising of Parliament was seen as a way of civilising Parliament. With the television cameras beaming down, it was argued, MPs would act with more decorum. Far from it. They were on show and the behaved like showbiz personalities. Sitting hours were changed. Committees systems were changed. Electronic voting is mooted. With the move in 1988 to the bigger House, the majesty of the architecture did not reflect in the quality of the debate.

In the past month, what was seen as fundamental changes to Question Time were made in the wake of the Blewett report. Instead of all Ministers and the Prime Minister attending, a roster system was applied. The Prime Minister attends on Monday and Thursday and other Ministers attend on roster. The aim was to free the Prime Minister to attend to other matters of national importance and to enable MPs to target particular Ministers on other days to seek and presumably receive genuine answers to genuine questions seeking information about matters of public importance.
Continue reading “1994_02_february_leader27feb”

The world’s largest computer software company, Microsoft, has lost a major patent case which will prevent it from marketing its successful DoubleSpace program in future software.

According to a report in the Washington Post, Microsoft Corporation, was ordered this week to pay Stac Electronics Inc $US120 million for patent infringement.

Microsoft said it would appeal the verdict. But in the meantime it will remove from its best-selling MS-DOS software the infringing “DoubleSpace” feature, which allows users to store nearly double the amount of data and programs on their hard disks.

DoubleSpace is only on DOS version six and later. People with these versions are unlikely to be affected.
Continue reading “1994_02_february_double”

The Business Software Association of Australia has announced that the time for warnings is over. It says illegal copying of software costs its members $400 million a year in Australia. It will now spend 75 per cent, rather than 50 per cent, of its Budget on litigation, cutting education from 50 to 25 per cent.

It will raid premises under what are called Anton-Piller court orders which enable the raiders to seize evidence, which can mean seizing computers. The BSAA is willing to pay a $2500 reward to people who dob in a pirate.

On its face it seems that the software publishers are like the British Navy, patrolling the seas and upholding the law by boarding parties if necessary, and that the copiers are flying the Jolly Roger.

Well, the British Navy has a long history of defending unjustifiable monopolies which enrich the few at the expense of the many. Now the software publishers are self-righteously going on the warpath to defend the plunder they make under a far too-generous monopoly.

The copyright monopoly which runs until 50 years after the author’s death, was originally there to give authors (and their children) reasonable return for their written work, and as the works of, say, Dickens and Wordsworth show, to ensure the public ultimately gets a return when the works come into the public domain.
Continue reading “1994_02_february_column28feb”