Crispin Hull

City Hill is one of the points of the Parliamentary Triangle _ an intersection of Canberra the national city and Canberra the municipal city.

It is now also the centre of a bureaucratic and political triangle _ or more correctly quadrangle.

The sides of the quadrangle contain the ACT Government, the National Capital Planning Authority, the parliamentary Joint Committee on the National Capital and the Federal Minister responsible for Canberra, Brian Howe, also affectionately known as the Minister for Better Cities.
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The Governor-General, Bill Hayden, dabbled in some more sociology yesterday, this time with a little help from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Mr Hayden set out to lay to rest yesterday the myth that Canberra workers had high levels of earnings.

He did this in three ways. He compared Canberra to other capital cities (as distinct from whole states or territories). He standardised the Canberra figures making allowances for Canberra’s higher education. And he compared Canberra with other similar-sized urban statistical areas in Sydney, and found they were better off.
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A residents’ group has come into conflict with Canberra’s “sporting heartland” over controlling traffic from Belconnen to the city.

After the publication of the Territory Plan earlier this month, the North Canberra Protection Group said yesterday that Ginninderra Drive should be extended from its T-junction with Mouat Street to Northbourne Avenue rather than widening Mouat Street to take the Belconnen traffic.

The group said the $4 million proposal under the Territory Plan to widen Mouat Street would adversely affect residents with noise and would not provide as good a traffic flow as extending Ginninderra Drive to Northbourne Avenue.
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Students who over-enrol or tackle subjects without passing the prerequisites are more likely to fail, according to a University of Canberra study.

But once failed, the chances of repeating students are the same as other students.

The study looked at Finance 1, one of the university’s subjects with a reputation for being difficult to pass.
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Rosemary Follett’s fiscal frolic last week (jun12-jun 19) brought a predictable round of squeals from those hit hardest, in this case land owners.

Ms Follett could have raised some of the amount $13 million a year in a very similar way and not received the same squeals. She could have re-introduced death duties. Then those taxed could not squeal.

Oh no, not death duties. All the think tanks have praised John Bjelke-Petersen for abolishing death duties in the 1970s, setting off a “”competitive” chain of death-duty abolition among all the states.
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The ACT Government was over-reacting in asking the Deputy Prime Minister, Brian Howe, to overturn the federal parliamentary committee’s finding on City Hill, Independent MLA Helen Szuty said yesterday.

“”The Deputy Prime Minister is hardly likely to overturn the decision of a broad-based parliamentary committee in which both Senator Margaret Reid and John Langmore have been involved,” she said.

Federal sources point out that the ACT Government might be barking up the wrong tree in turning to Mr Howe to overturn the committee’s recommendation. As the law stands Mr Howe, as Minister, is only empowered to disallow an NCPA draft variation of the national plan. He has no power to create a variation, such as one to permit six-storey buildings.
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THE Chief Magistrate, Ron Cahill, has a point. He has seven or eight courtrooms in four or five locations.

It is inefficient to have magistrates wandering about the town and court staff working all over the place. How much better it would be to have one court building next to the Supreme Court with a common library, cells and offices for court staff.

And thus the ACT Government came up with a plan for a six-storey building next to the Supreme Court in Vernon Circle. But that area is part of the national area of Canberra and the present national plan has a height limit of three storeys, so as not to detract from City Hill, one of the points of the Parliamentary Triangle.
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HALF a decade ago Nicholas Carson wrote to the chief editorial executive of The Sydney Morning Herald and said, “”I have no wish to sue your company for defamation.”

Carson ended up suing, and his case was ruled upon in the High Court last week. He was upset over an article written by John Slee over some complicated litigation by Leszek Rajski involving some computer wizardry. Slee quoted Rajski’s accusation against Carson that Carson used some underhand legal tactics to undermine Rajski’s legal action.

Slee made a fundamental error of not giving Carson a decent right of explanation, and any solicitor reading Slee’s column would have thought that Carson was a bit of a sleaze for acting the way he did, when in fact there was no foundation for that.
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IT WAS either 1971 or 1972. I was in a lift at (old) Parliament House, running messages. It was packed with journalists, including Alan Reid, then perhaps in his late 50s. I forget what the issue was, perhaps the Commonwealth’s grab for the seabed or something like it. Reid was in a pontificating mood. “”Barring natural disasters,” he said. “”All the best stories come out of the Constitution.”

This was pre-Whitlam, pre-1975, pre-Tasmanian Dams; pre-Darwin cyclone and, of course, pre-Mabo. Reid was no doubt thinking of the bank-nationalisation case, the uniform-tax case or petrol rationing, but his words have held up well.

Mabo is essentially a constitutional case. The finding of native title was one matter; of greater import was finding its constitutional underpinning that would make it enforceable: the requirement that the Federal Government can only take property on “”just terms” and the finding that the Racial Discrimination Act was a valid exercise of the foreign-affairs power, so the states could not extinguish native title because it would also inevitably breach that Act.
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THE FINER points of Saudi Arabian jurisprudence had an immediate attraction one day last week. A brat broke into my car and knocked off the stereo.

Slicing off a couple of hands in Garema Place every Friday would do the trick, I thought with middle-class anger. It took at least half a day for the Saudi approach to be replaced with the boring old politically correct notion of giving the recession-deprived urchin just one more final chance with magisterial wag of the finger and yet another bond.

Anyway, this column is not about jurisprudence this week, but design: good and bad.
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