Crispin Hull

A group of the 56 Chinese refugees who arrived on the Isabella in north-west Australia had just got their visas to stay in Australia for four year.

Several of them will live in Canberra and continue to study English, others will return to Melbourne to work. It has been a long bureaucratic battle with authorities, fought on their behalf by Marion Le and others.

The group were in the Port Hedland detention centre for more than a year before the Government recognised the refugee status of some of them. Mrs Le points out the seemingly arbitrary nature of the process. Some with seemingly identical circumstances get different status. The cases of the remaining Chinese from the Isabella and some Cambodians who came by boat are still going through the courts.
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The Minister for the Arts, Bob McMullan, is confident that the Government pre-election promise on the National Museum would be met, despite specualtion that it will come under fire at the Expenditure Review Committee.

On February 28, the Government promised $26 million towards the $65 million Stage 1 of the museum on the Yarramundi Reach site. A further $13 million in infrastructure (roads sewerage, water electricity) was to come from the ACT and the private sector was to provide $26 million.

A spokesperson for Senator McMullan said the promise was looking strong, but “”the Minister cannot make any formal announcement in the pre-Budget context”.
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Father David Passi calls it black man’s science _ a malevolent force on the island or Mer in the Torres Strait.

“”Oh yes, Malo has an evil side,” he said. “”And I know its power.”

He spoke of gardens poisoned by sorcery and people killed by it. His grandfather refused to teach it to him because it was evil.

“”It is such a destructive force economically,” he said. “”Why plant a garden up there if it will be poisoned by a man sitting on the beach.”
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Ninety per cent of Australians would be concerned if employment opportunities were reduced by the Mabo decision, according to a national survey conducted by the Australian Mining Industry Council.

However, it found 41 per cent thought Aborigines should be compensated if land cannot be handed back because it is being used by others. But 56 per cent said they should not be.

The survey showed very high awareness of the decision and very high levels of concern about it, but also widespread ignorance of related matters.
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Life was looking grim for Leng Diep in 1980. He, his wife, Pheap, and child were in a refugee camp on the Thai border.

Thirteen years later is the owner of a Canberra-based computer company employing 16 people (Australian-born and Cambodia) and turning over $3 million a year.

Marion Le calls him one of the many success stories.
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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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