Crispin Hull

John Howard’s brave new industrial-relations world will create a brave new constitutional world if he’s successful.

But to be successful, it will require an enormous extension of Commonwealth power. This is ironic, if not hypocritical, coming from the Coalition which has championed states’ rights for so long.

Much of the Howard plan is clearly within Commonwealth power; but much of it breaks new ground which could easily be challenged in the High Court.
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Almost two-thirds of freedom-of-information requests are not decided upon within the time required by law.

It has caused the office of the Attorney-General, Terry Connolly, to tell the unit looking after FOI “”to lift its game”.

According to the draft FOI annual report, there has been a general decline in the ACT’s FOI performance over the past three years for response times and granting of access to documents.
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Going it alone in the employment world can be very tough. It can also be very rewarding. People in film and television have learnt this over the years.

Lyndon Sayer-Jones, who writes a column for Encore, the Australian film industry’s trade magazine has just published a book on the law on film and television: Law Brief. The Australian Film and Television Industry in the Nineties.

The industry is laced with traps and pitfalls, not only legal ones, but practical ones.

In a normal week, the book would have limited interest. This week, it has wider appeal. The Opposition spokesman on industrial relations, John Howard, has just released IR II the sequel to IR which did not do so well at the ballot-box office in 1990.
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Saving the trees is important. However, the computers that were to save paper (remember the paperless office) have combined with the fax machine and photocopying machine to cause an outpouring of paper enough to wreck our balance of payments.

So every attempt to save paper must be welcomed. One has arrived this week: The Electronic Law Book Series.

The trouble with the law, of course, is that Parliament is forever changing it or adding to it. In the five years to 1990 it enacted 17,907 pages of legislation. Moreover, we poor electors are deemed to know the law.
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The processes of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation would just give a warm feeling from holding hands and singing songs, a former head of the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Charles Perkins, said yesterday.

He said the real question was “”who owns this land in the first place”.

He was speaking at a conference on Constitutional Change in the 1990s in Darwin.

He called for immediate talk of sovereignty, national land rights and a treaty. These issues had to come first, he said.
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The director of the Northern Land Council, Mick Dodson, called yesterday for a separate Aboriginal government with direct relations with the Federal Government.

The idea was rejected as preposterous by the Northern Territory Chief Minister, Marshall Perron.

Mr Dodson said the education, health, housing, municipal services, roads, power and water services provided by the Northern Territory were not the sort of services Aboriginal people wanted.
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Conference entitled Freedom and Independence for the Golden Lands of Australia. Theatrette Parliament House and Humanities Research Centre, ANU. The conference will centre of the idea of republicanism in Australia. Organised by the Centre for Australian Cultural Studies.

Crocodiles are good for tourism and tourism is good for the crocs. They add an excitement, danger and exoticism for overseas travellers, especially Americans, without the discomfort. There’s nothing like viewing a fearsome, dangerous crocodile in Australia _ a country where they speak English and you can drink water out of the tap. All the excitement without the discomfort of Africa.

Moreover, force is added to their travel stories back home in Winslow, Arizona, by the fact an American tourist was actually killed by one.
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The Labor Party had done it, there would be screams that the socialist hordes were at the gates ready to rip the fabric of society asunder.

But if it is proposed by the conservative parties, it raises hardly a murmur.

I am talking about John Howard’s Jobsback proposal to set up a Federal bureaucracy (the Office of Employee Advocate) to meddle in the traditional way freedom of contract is upheld in the common-law courts: which allows the rich to hire lawyers so the poor and the oppressed get done.

Is this not like the Office of Race Relations or a Sex Discrimination Commission going into to bat for the oppressed non-WASPs?
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The ACT Government has to be concerned about the High Court’s ruling in the X-rated video case last week, at least in the long-term.

In the short-term it is of little moment. The tax can be quite easily restored.

But first let’s look at what the court said. Section 90 of the Constitution says the power of the Federal Parliament to impose excise is an exclusive power. That means State and Territory Parliaments cannot levy excise taxes. But the precise definition of excise has troubled the High Court for the past 80 years.
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