Crispin Hull

PUBLIC debate has been stirred again about land title. It has been stirred nationally about the Mabo decision. In the ACT it has been stirred about betterment tax. Oddly enough, the matters are similar. It is a question of who gets the occupation and use of certain tracts of land and what use can they put the land to.

In the ACT debate has widened about land tax. As the ACT Government faces harder times with less money coming form the Federal Government it has to either spend less or pick up revenue from other places. In that environment of economic pressure, a debate has ensued about revenue available from land, more especially about revenue gained from variations in lease purpose clauses, or to use the nomenclature of the states, changes in zoning.
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WHEN the Founding Fathers gave the Commonwealth Parliament power to make law with respect to “”postal, telegraphic and other like services”, they recognised, even in the 1890s, the national importance of communications, and that communications was not like other commodities. Since then, successive Federal Parliaments have regulated the provision of communication services, recognising there is a community element to such things as postal and telephone services, especially in a country like Australia where distances as so vast.

The regulation has usually taken the form of cross-subsidies so that people in remote areas do not have to pay the crippling actual cost of the provision of services, but could get them at reasonable costs like their city cousins. Thus, it cost as much to post a letter from Cooma South to Perth as from Cooma South to Cooma North. In telephone services, the cross-subsidy took the form of provide comparatively cheap installation in the bush. And people in their own communities could ring each other for a set fee, irrespective of the time of the call. Long-distance calls, through necessity, remained distance-charged.
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THE Minister for Science, Senator Chris Schacht, has been too hasty with his submissions on the CSIRO and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. Moreover, his submission is going to the wrong place, and probably for the wrong reasons.

Senator Schacht plans to take three divisions from the CSIRO _ oceanography, fisheries and atmospheric research _ and to amalgamate them with the Townsville-based Australian Institute of Marine Science to form a new organisation which would be based in Adelaide or Perth. ANSTO would then be merged with what is left of the CSIRO.
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Some of the most destructive periods in the history of many places in the world occur over disputes between different ethnic groups over occupation of land and the right to self-determination on it. Usually, the disputes take the form of a prior occupancy against a newer occupant who has effective rule of the territory. Examples abound: the Kurdish disputes; Northern Ireland; Israel/Palestine; the Basque territory; Bosnia; Tibet, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, and a dozen disputes in the former Soviet Union. The list goes on. Some of the disputes involve extreme violence and war. Others are festering sores of historic discontent without overt violence. Either, however way they engender great human suffering. Invariably, the violent solution does not work and peace, reconciliation and an end to suffering come only through political leadership, which, alas, is so often lacking in these circumstances. Might is right is too often applied.

When one looks at the world’s trouble spots a pattern emerges of one ethnic or religious group feeling dispossessed and alienated from the social and governmental structure of the state in which they happen to live. Leaving aside general cries for democracy in totalitarian states, there is hardly a trouble spot on earth, now or in the past, that does not at least loosely fit this pattern.
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The ACT Government was creating a climate where people were questioning whether to invest in ACT housing, the president of the Landlords Association, Peter Jansen, said yesterday.

His comments came after the Opposition Housing spokesman, Greg Cornwell, accused the Government of breaking a promise on land tax. The Government denied it.

Mr Cornwell said the Government had promised last year to stagger land tax and rates payments, but they were still both due on August 15.
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The ACT Leader of the Opposition, Kate Carnell, called yesterday for a review of rates in the ACT after receiving hundreds of protests from residents who have been bit with huge increases.

Ms Carnell said rates had increased dramatically over the past four years in most areas of Canberra.

However, the Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett, said the Liberals were being hypocritical. When in power they raised rates by 16.6 per cent in one year. Labor had increased them on 14.6 per cent in three years.
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A coalition of 13 North Canberra groups called yesterday for a stop to redevelopment or in-fill in North Canberra until the ACT Government provides clear details of its plan for the area.

They are concerned that once redevelopment starts a North Watson there would be no turning back and the area could be another Kingston. They say that once the Government spends the money on an improved sewer it will be committed financially to other in-fill.

The groups also received support from southside and Belconnen groups. The groups include various groups from individual suburbs and the Canberra Conservation Council.
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Every shop sign was in Greek. It was Abbotsford or Carlton in inner Melbourne in the mid-1960s. Perhaps it was Hoddle Street, but the signs were all Greek.

Then in the mid-1980s, I was back in that street. The buildings and traffic lights were exactly as I recalled them two decades earlier, but the signs were all Vietnamese. And thus it is in Cabramatta, in Sydney.

“”When my husband went to Cabramatta, he cried. It was just like Saigon.”
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The ACT Liberal Party called on the ACT Government to break its promise on putting a hospice on Acton peninsula.

The leader of the party, Kate Carnell, said the hospice would become a white elephant unless Government diverted millions of dollars from other urgent health priorities into the complex.

Work on the 17-bed hospice is due to begin next month.
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The application of the Mabo was much less certain on the mainland than on Torres Strait islands, the Leader of the Opposition, John Hewson, said yesterday.

He was speaking on Murray Island, the subject of the Mabo decision, after discussions with the Community Council and the Council of Elders.

He implied that unlike in the islands, the necessary proof of continuous association with the land to establish native title would be very difficult on the mainland, but he did not want to prejudge it.
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