Crispin Hull

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”

Continuing fall in the annual road toll is a pleasing development. Last year the ACT had its lowest toll for 25 years. Other states and territories, too, have had record lows, or at least a general trend downward.

But before we bask in self-congratulation, the reasons for the trend need closer examination. True, the population and car use have risen since the horror tolls of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when typically around 3000 people died and 30,000 people were injured on Australian roads each year, compared to about two-thirds of that now. However, we would be fooling ourselves if we imagined that the fall has come about through any great enlightenment or self-restraint among drivers. There is no cause for self-congratulation because the reduced road toll has come about almost solely through heavy law-enforcement measures and to a lesser extent better roads and safer cars.

The law-enforcement measures have been most significant. In the past 20 years compulsory seat-belts and child restraints, radar, red-light and speed cameras, on-the-spot fines, random breath-testing and demerit points have been introduced throughout Australia and instantaneous licence suspension in some states. It has been a stealthy but significant intrusion into civil liberties. If all the measures had been proposed in one legislative package in, say, 1969 they would have been rejected amid public outcry.
Continue reading “1994_01_january_leaderjan3”

Medical science continues to leap ahead of public opinion and the legal system. In-vitro fertilisation developments in the past month has astonished and revolted many people.

In Britain a 59-year-old woman gave birth to twins after being given in-vitro fertilisation treatment in Italy and a 62-year-old woman is three months pregnant after similarly receiving an embryo implant. Then it was announced that it was possible for a couple to chose the colour of a child. A black woman chose an egg from a white woman. Initially it was thought she did this to ensure a mixed-race looking child because her husband was mixed race, but later it was revealed she did this because of a shortage of donor eggs. None the less, the case showed that a choice was possible. And it is not limited to skin colour. Height, morphism, hair colour, IQ and other characteristics of the donor can also be selected. Apparently, we are in the age of designer babies.

These developments were followed by something more bizarre. A British researcher, Dr Roger Gosden, announced that eggs could be taken from aborted fetuses, fertilised and implanted into a carrier mother. The resultant child’s mother, in these circumstances would never have been born. Dr Gosden said the technique had been successful in mice and was technically only about three years away with humans. At present there is a shortage of donor eggs. Dr Gosden thought that eggs from fetuses could be used for thousands of young women who had premature menopause, who had lost fertility through radiation treatment for cancer or who were otherwise infertile. Fetal ovaries are laid down from about 10 to 12 weeks and reach a maximum of five million eggs by five months, declining to a million at birth.
Continue reading “1994_01_january_leader09jan”

THE share market hits post-1987-crash highs, the inevitable question is: how long can it last? All investment carries some risk. Even keeping money under the bed has risk (witness this week’s bushfires). The important thing for Australia is to ensure that investment risks are reasonable and not made unnecessarily high through speculators. Somehow, Australia has to ensure the greed-is-good mentality of the 1980s does not return. It led to the crash and five years of justifiable wariness on the part of investors.

As the market moves up it is worth recalling some of the lessons of 1987. Among the biggest losers were those who invested in companies founded on the sand of paper profits and borrowings. Those who invested in companies with lower borrowings and real assets had far lower losses. The paper-profit companies are either now non-existent or have share prices a tiny fraction of their pre-1987 high.

There is widespread optimism around at the beginning of 1994. If enough investors reject companies that try to create paper castles out of this optimism, there will be no paper castles, or at least fewer of them than in 1987.
Continue reading “1994_01_january_leader08jan”

Forces of nature combined with the carelessness of humans this week to cause tragic loss of life and property in more than 100 fires in south-east Australia. It was not, however, an unusual event. Every five years or so significant bushfires hit the nation. The causes are manifold: spring rain causing heavy undergrowth; failure to keep grass trimmed and undergrowth burned back in spring; careless smokers throwing away butts; lightning; careless campers and barbecuers; children playing with matches; car exhausts; and worst of all arson.

This year calls have been made to increase penalties for arson. It may make everyone feel good but it will not help much. Few arsonists get caught. Moreover, those cases where the arsonist is caught sometimes reveal peculiar mental elements to the crime: the desire for a revenge on society or just getting kicks. An increased penalty will not necessarily deter the crime. In any event, in cases where death occurs it is likely that present laws would enable murder or at least manslaughter charges to be brought where the prosecution can show the arsonist acted with reckless indifference to human life. Even if the arsonist is caught and a higher penalty applied, it will not help the families of victims or those who have lost property.

Preventative measures are of greater import. Clearly there is a price for Canberra’s green belts and native gardens in the suburbs. That does not mean that the green belts and the native gardens should go. Rather, Canberrans must acknowledge the danger and do something about it in the spring and early summer. It is not solely up to the ACT Government. It has a responsibility to keep excessive grass growth under control, but that does not mean residents should sit a whinge about “”why don’t they keep the grass cut”. Residents, especially those adjacent to the open space, can engage in a little self help — mowing and clearing where they can and keeping nature strips green and keeping dead leaves and bark away from houses and gutterings.
Continue reading “1994_01_january_leader07jan”

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.
Continue reading “1994_01_january_leader07jaa”

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.