Crispin Hull

More people are likely to favour the wider use of DNA testing following the incidents in the NSW town of Wee Waa in the past fortnight.

A Wee Waa woman in her 90s was rape on New Year’s Eve. Wee Waa is a small town. Townsfolk were alarmed at the thought of rapist in their midst. The NSW Police apparently saw it as an opportunity to get support for more widespread DNA databasing than other jurisdictions have envisaged. They arrived in force and began screening every man in the town who would volunteer to give a saliva sample. On Tuesday, 10 days after the test began, a Wee Waa man was charged with the rape after he turned himself in on Monday. It is not known whether he was one of the 500 men who gave voluntary samples in the past 10 days. He did, however, give a sample after he turned himself in.
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THE FEDERAL Government is getting a lot of short-term mileage and kudos from the quite small amount of money allotted to its new family program announced at the weekend.

The program will give more child care to people outside cities who work outside normal hours and will provide a cadetship program for youth. The Government will spend $240 million on its “”stronger families and communities program”. But it is spread over four years, making it $60 million a year. Compared with a total Budget outlay of about $160 billion, it is chicken feed. It is one-thirtieth of 1 per cent of government spending.

It does precious little to redress the huge slashes to child care made in earlier years … according to Labor’s health spokeswoman Jenny Macklin, totalling $800 million in the term of the Howard Government .

The Government says its scheme will provide more choice in child care, especially in regional areas, because it will be delivered by non-institutional providers. Maybe so, but individual child care in the home is very expensive. The money will not go far.
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The English jurist Edward Coke wrote in his Laws of England in 1628 “”A man’s house is his castle.” The phrase articulates two elements of the common-law tradition. The first is that a person’s home should not be violated without a judicial search warrant. The second is that a person can do or build whatever they like on their own land. And like a castle, the house can be defended.

It is likely that Daryl Parker had the latter in mind when he decided to build a 6m and 2m shed at his house in Gordon. He wanted it in his front yard so there would be room in the safety of the back for his children to play. He was doing what he thought best for himself and his family. But the law embodied in the saying “”a man’s house is his castle” has, quite rightly, been qualified in the past 372 years. It has had to be. There are more things that can be done to or on land that are harmful to others. They include physical things like smoke emissions and less physical things like noise, closing off light and aesthetics. In a city, we aim to maximise our enjoyment of the land. It means that for all to get reasonable enjoyment, there have to be restrictions on others.
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Over the past decade and a half Bill Gates has built up one of the largest corporate empires the world has ever seen. He is chairman and largest shareholder in Microsoft, the computer software company. A US court has found it in breach of the tough anti-competition Sherman Act. It was the same Act that forced the huge telecommunications company AT&T to be split up two decades ago. AT&T had the business of virtually every telephone subscriber in the US. The Microsoft case is slightly different. For a start, unlike AT&T Microsoft is dominated by one man. Secondly, Microsoft is a vertical monopoly as well as a horizontal one. Microsoft has a horizontal monopoly in that it has supplied the operating system on 90 per cent of the personal computers in the world. It also has vertical monopolies which has spun off from that. It supplies a very large section of the market for computer applications software like word processing and spreadsheet programs. It also supplies a very large proportion of internet browser software.

The US Justice Department has shown to the satisfaction of a court that Microsoft has unfairly leveraged its internet browser software into the market on the back of its operating system software. Microsoft realised that market share is more important in new technology than next quarter’s profits. So it bundled its internet browser software in with its operating system software so 90 per cent of the personal computers in the world came with Microsoft’s internet browser already installed. Moreover, it intertwined the two software systems in such a way that it became awkward for computer users to use any other internet browser with the Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The court ruled that this was unfair. Microsoft has failed to come up with any satisfactory solution to allow others into the market. It now seems the court will find its own way to deal with the abuse of monopoly position.

Alas, it seems the court might just go for penalties. Microsoft is large enough and wealthy enough to pay them without feeling it too hard. It can then continue with its vertical monopoly, perhaps not abusing its monopoly position as aggressively as in the past, but still behaving in a way that is against the best interests of the world’s computing public.

It would be far better if the court ordered the splitting up of Microsoft into its three logical parts: operating-system company, an applications company and an internet browser company. At present, one of main (and perhaps only) reason many people buy Microsoft products is just because everyone else has them and incompatibility problems can be avoided. But that comes at a big price. Microsoft tries to do everything, usually by taking products from other developers. Invariably, they have teething problems and Microsoft expects its customers to be the guinea pigs in ironing out glitches. And because Microsoft is a monopoly it has lost the competitive pressure to innovate. At the same time it stifles the ability of others to innovate. It also uses its power in one sector to market in another by bundling its operating system, applications and internet software at the time of hardware purchase. It then locks them together so that non-Microsoft products are at a disadvantage.

If Microsoft were split into three different suppliers, they would be able to compete more effectively and innovatively in supplying applications software and internet-browsing software for Microsoft Windows as well as non-Microsoft operating systems. They would be open systems with source code available to anyone who wanted to develop any sort of software to run on them.

For too long Microsoft has stifled innovation by buying out or beating down competitors with new products or just copying the key elements of the new product but in an inferior way. The quicker the monopoly is split up the better. Bill Gates would get market price for his shares, but Microsoft would no longer be able to abuse a monopoly position.

On October 1, 1954, an undercover policeman walked into Mansell’s Newsagency in Hay Street, Sydney.

What happened next was to go into the annals of Australian legal history. The case was to go to the highest court in the law and seven judges would rule on it.

Am I talking murder, huge corporate fraud or matter upon which the fate of governments would rest? No. The undercover policeman bought . . . wait for it . . . a lottery ticket. But it was not an ordinary lottery ticket. It was – shock horror – a Tasmanian lottery ticket.

The previous decade, the NSW Parliament had passed a law prohibiting the sale of “”foreign” lottery tickets. And by foreign, it included lotteries from other Australian states. Pernicious foreigners were leading New South Welshmen into the iniquity of rampant gambling and something had to be done about, not only to save New South Welshmen, but also to get a few votes to save the Government. Sound familiar?

Mansell faced a fine and loss of a lucrative business, but he was in no position to deny he sold the dreaded Tasmanian ticket.

Instead, he challenged the constitutional validity of the NSW Lotteries Act. He argued that it infringed Section 92 of the Constitution that says “”trade, commerce and intercourse among the states . . . shall be absolutely free.”

How dare the NSW Parliament stop the interstate trade in lottery tickets, he argued.

What was the result? The legal result was that the High Court held the NSW law valid. You could stop the trade and commerce in lottery tickets and trade and commerce would still be absolutely free, the learned judges ruled. More on that anon.
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The best thing about all the ignorance being displayed in the Aboriginal reconciliation debate is that there’s a cure available to the racists — a jolly good book.

It’s entitled Guns, Germs and Steel and subtitled A History of Everybody for the last 13,000 years.

It’s written by Jared Diamond and it contains a certain cure for those who care to read it. It puts paid to the nonsense that somehow Aboriginal people are “inferior” to their British colonisers because, as some would have it, the white boys won and the blackfellas lost.

It puts paid to the shallow comparisons between migrants and Aborigines. Bill Mandle and others have argued, for example, that while Aborigines have “”done nothing” for 40,000 the migrant whites developed the place. They have argued that if it is possible for Arvi Parvo and other migrants to arrive on the shore penniless and made good, surely some Aborigines should be able to do the same thing.

Diamond’s book explains why not. Diamond is one of America’s finest scholars who has made a brilliant contribution to evolutionary biology. Guns, Germs and Steel won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction but because it’s a long book – about 500 pages – with not many pictures it has not attracted mass readership. It has not even fed its way down to commercial talk-back. The ideas are too complex for that media, though they are compelling.
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Judgement was entered in the Supreme Court yesterday in favour of Federal Capital Press, publisher of The Canberra Times, in a defamation action brought by the owners of the Campbell shops over half a dozen articles about disputes with tenants going back six years.

The case involved a number of preliminary hearings before the Master involving technical legal matters. Under the terms of the judgment, the plaintiffs will be required to pay a proportion of The Canberra Times’s legal costs in addition to their own costs.

The Editor of The Canberra Times, Jack Waterford, said it was a myth that defamation is a quick way for plaintiffs to make a pot or gold or get a tennis court or a swimming pool. Often it can be a very expensive and risky undertaking to sue a newspaper with costs running to tens of thousands of dollars.

“”There were other remedies available by dealing directly with the newspaper and if that fails by going to the Australian Press Council,” he said.

A couple of very law-abiding acquaintances have expressed private outrage recently at being picked up for traffic offences.

I had little sympathy. I was in a horrible car crash as a child. Blood and guts all around. Bloke in the other car killed. Family members in hospital for weeks. Permanent after effects. Etc etc.

The I found myself absent-mindedly doing 50km/h in a school zone. I usually travel at 50 or 55 in the 60 zone, so I was doing my normal speed but had not recognised the school zone. There but for the grace of god etc. I, too, could have been done. Essentially law-abiding, road-safety conscious person with nary a speeding ticket in 30 years driving etc.

I am a rabid supporter of lower speed limits, random breath-testing, speed cameras and the whole box and dice. One ghastly crash and some time as a reporter covering crashes was enough. I wonder if I had been done it would have eroded my road-safety zealotry. It has made me wonder whether there is any more mileage to be had out of enforcement. We should retain what we have: compulsory seat-belts, radar and speed cameras, random breath-testing and so on. Combined with safer cars and roads, they have cause the road toll to drop from 3321 in 1981 to around 1760 in 1997. That is a good result. But is it enough? Why should anyone at all die on the roads?
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A spat broke out this week over whether the ACT’s Hare-Clark electoral system discriminates against women.

The ACT branch secretary of the ALP, Michael Kerrisk, said, “the Hare-Clark electoral system used here in the ACT, and the one chosen by the Liberal Party, is a brutal one. . . . Increasing at the level of female representation in the Assembly will not be easy. . . . The Hare-Clark electoral system is all about promoting the individual at the expense of the party. And in any system like this, female candidates will often be unsuccessful.”

At present, there are only two female members of the Legislative Assembly out of 17. And we do have a Hare-Clark system. But the latter, of itself, did not cause of the former.

This election, women were pre-selected by each of the major parties to every or winnable seat except one. The winnable seats for the major parties are two each in the two five-member electorates (Brindabella and Ginninderra) and three each in the seven-member electorate (Molonglo). (Only one major party will actually win a third seat in Molonglo, however, it is still winnable by either of them.)

The Liberal Party has pre-selected three women to stand in Molonglo, two women to stand in Ginninderra but only one to stand in Brindabella. That is six women for seven winnable seats.
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The difference between a rational expectation of an ordered world and blind faith that the world is ordered is a very fine one.

Every few seconds I was swinging between the two.

It was at Vail, America’s largest and arguably best skiing resort. And I was not skiing. There were other things to do than the standard day of skiing. For a start it was night.

Imagine an ordinary bicycle. Imagine someone taking off the pedals and throwing them away and then replacing each wheel with a short ski. And there you have a ski-bike. The rider wears ski boots each with a 30cm ski attached and uses them and the bicycle handlebar to steer. There are no brakes. Let me repeat that. There are no brakes.

Instead the rider negotiates down the ski-slopes like a skier, using turns to slow down and to prevent catastrophic crashes into the firs and aspen forests.

I haven’t finished yet. You do this ski-biking at night, armed with a miner’s lamp. There are no lights illuminating the slopes.

I and a couple of others were being led down the slope by Tatayana – a young woman from Slovakia. Her surname spelt out like letters leftover from a game of Scrabble.

By now I had got to know American ski slopes. The green and blue runs (beginner and intermediate) down which these ski-bikes go are groomed immaculately. Unlike Australian ski-fields where the cover is usually not deep and rocks stick up in inconvenient places, these slopes have no hazards.

I thought of Franklin Roosevelt – there was only one thing to fear, and that was fear itself. It was an ordered world. I knew there would be no hazards and that I could zig and zag down the slope to avoid picking up fatal speed.
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