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Article written for The Canberra Times’s special edition on the 20th anniversary of self-government for the Australian Capital Territory.
IF THE ACT were split in 17 single-member electorates, the ALP would have won all 17 of them at the last election – on just 37.5 per cent of the vote. Continue reading “Evolution of electoral system”

Article written for The Canberra Times’s special edition on the 20th anniversary of self-government for the Australian Capital Territory.
THE House of Farce. The words stared out from the newsagents’ posters. Continue reading “House of farce no more”

JUSTICE Lex Lasry, of the Victorian Supreme Court, had a great big slash at the media this week in the Blackburn Memorial Lecture in Canberra. Continue reading “Unelected judges the least of our worries”

JOHN Dawkins, a Treasurer and Minister for Education in the Hawke Government, had a problem. How was he to reverse the extravagance of the Whitlam Government’s free tertiary education without causing a middle-class revolt against Labor. Continue reading “A painless way for Treasurers to raise revenue”

THE Stockholm International Peace Research Institute presented the dismaying news this week that the world weapons trade has grown 20 per cent in the past five years.

The bulk of it went to the Middle East and the bulk of it came from the US. Continue reading “Military spends just adds to insecurity”

“I would not be Treasurer for a hundred pounds, said Alice” – apologies to A. A. Milne.

TREASURIES, Treasurers and Finance Ministers almost routinely under-estimate the effect of economic swings on Government revenues and spending. Continue reading “Govts under-estimate revenue slides”

THIS week I was fortunate to be in a rainforest in Tropical North Queensland. (Incidentally, they prefer to call it that because the initials sound better than those of Far North Queensland.) Anyway, it started to rain, as it does in rainforests. Continue reading “New web to expunge tech needed by excluded”

THE rubbishy North Korean missile sent into the sky by a tin-pot dictatorship this week may not have been technically far off from having had a nuclear warhead. Continue reading “Bush v Obama: complexity beats simplicity”

THE stars a lining up for an increase in the membership of the Legislative Assembly. But there is a political and legal minefield ahead. Continue reading “Bigger Assembly faces hurdles”

How is it that governments can sometimes initiate great public inquiries into major policy questions with submissions being made public – even on the internet – and interim and final reports again being cast into the public arena for intemperate journalists and ill-tempered Opposition members to trawl their way through for their argumentative ammunition? Continue reading “Secrecy is governments’ enemy”