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Showing posts from 1997

Freedom to speak his own mind

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Edition 1SUN 11 MAY 1997, Page 133 Freedom to speak his own mind By RICHARD FARMER   A PARTY leader who deliberately turns his back on ministerial office is an unusual politician -and Ron Boswell is just that. Although the National Party leader in the Upper House, Senator Boswell is not the minister for anything. He has chosen the greater independence of not being restricted by the concept of collective Cabinet responsibility to the perks and pay of high office. When he speaks, Senator Boswell wants to be able to speak his own mind -and he's not reticent about doing just that. Not that the senior Queensland senator is some oddball rebel. His freedom of speech is exercised with restraint and normally he is as reliable a vote as the Coalition Government can get. Senator Boswell is as good a conservative as they come, but occasionally he feels the need to fire a verbal broadside at his colleagues who have chosen the conventional route to political influence by joining the ministry.

PM can't ignore demons of the Right

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Edition 1SUN 27 APR 1997, Page 043 PM can't ignore demons of the Right By RICHARD FARMER   LIBERAL Party tacticians could do worse than read the history of the party during the 1950s and early 1960s as they grapple with how to handle the growth of fanatical parties of the Right. Back in the pre-Whitlam days, Labor was reduced to political impotency by not knowing how to react to the various shades of Marxism within its own ranks. The Liberal and National Parties now risk the same fate as they try to work out how to live with Pauline Hanson and the motley collection of parties springing up on a belief that the established conservative Coalition does not take its policies far enough. The Labor Party's dilemma of old has many similarities with that of Prime Minister John Howard today. Within the Labor Party there were many who agreed with the Marxists about the utopia of the socialist State to come. The differences were about how to get to the promised land, rather than what wou

Bad guys hurt the good guys

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Edition 1SUN 20 APR 1997, Page 138 Bad guys hurt the good guys By RICHARD FARMER   BLAMING the government -whether it is responsible or not -is the normal reaction of voters and John Howard well knows it. It is the reason that he is floundering around trying to make it look like he is doing something about Mal Colston while hoping to keep benefiting from his presence in the Senate. For more than a year the Labor Opposition has been unable to dent Mr Howard's high standing in the opinion polls by pointing to things that he has actually done or left undone. Now the disclosure of the details of the travel and other expense claims of the Queensland Independent Senator, claims for which the government is in no way responsible, is starting to hurt the Coalition's standing. There is certainly very little that is fair about politics when the actions of the bad guys hurt the good guys, but that is how it is. All politicians get smeared with the muck raked up about the few and one part

Howard's image in full retreat

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Edition 1SUN 30 MAR 1997, Page 123 Howard's image in full retreat By RICHARD FARMER   JOHN Howard is not blessed with any of the normal physical attributes of a charismatic politician, but during his long career in the House of Representatives he has shown a willingness to make the best of what he has. Look at a picture of a smiling Mr Howard 20 years ago and compare it with one today. You'll see a triumph of the dentist's art. Study the before and after eyebrows, and note the difference. Clearly on display is a politician prepared to allow some minor cosmetic artistry to improve on nature's handiwork. And quite sensibly, too. In this television age, the distraction of physical oddity is sufficient to overshadow the power of any words uttered. Look too unusual, and it doesn't matter how sensible a politician is. Having decided that he wanted to give becoming Prime Minister a go, it was a natural step for Mr Howard to put himself forward in the most attractive ligh

Furthering family values

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Edition 1SUN 02 MAR 1997, Page 132 Furthering family values By RICHARD FARMER   FAMILY values have taken on a new meaning since the Government of John Howard became dependant on Senator Mal Colston to achieve majority support in the Senate. How to keep the valuable dollars within the family is the example being set. First of all, employ your wife on the secretarial staff and when she suffers an unfortunate accident which requires compensation from the public purse, bestow the job upon a student son and bring his spouse in on the payroll for good measure. That makes it easier to share the drive-yourself government car around the family in a way that maximises its use because Deputy Senate President dad can always get a chauffered one if he really needs it. Above all, do not stint on the living-away-from-home allowances. There's a nice little earn on the difference between the daily allowance for a Senator and the cost of a flat across the border in the struggle town of Queanbeyan.

Meddling in morals But 'irrational' senator not forcing PM's hand

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Edition 1SUN 23 FEB 1997, Page 126 Meddling in morals/But 'irrational' senator not forcing PM's hand By BY RICHARD FARMER   TO blame Brian Harradine for the latest example of the Federal Government's imposition of its own version of political correctness is to miss the point. The Tasmanian senator is not forcing John Howard to make decisions which are against the Prime Minister's better judgment. Australia is now run by a very conservative man who needs no encouragement at all to impose his moral values on the rest of us. There is a startling inconsistency in Mr Howard's intellectual position. When it comes to economic life, he embraces the virtues of a free market in which individuals should be able to make rational decisions which they see as being to their benefit. In that respect, Adam Smith would be proud of him. But when it comes to the actions of individuals in their personal lives, Mr Howard abandons any pretence of libertarianism. It's quite all r

Minister for Irresponsibility

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Edition 1SUN 16 FEB 1997, Page 129 Minister for Irresponsibility By RICHARD FARMER   THERE was a time when ministers of the Crown took [responsibility] for the way government administers things, but that was all long ago when people even believed that the House of Representatives was an important component in running the country. Nowadays, when the relevance of the Lower House has been reduced to determining once every three years which party becomes the government, ministers are prepared to take the credit when things go right but not the criticism when something goes wrong. The very institutional framework has been changed to try to make the people believe that is how things should be. The cover for the new system of ministerial care but no ministerial responsibility is the notion of statutory offices where legislation gives an unelected person a power to make decisions in a supposedly independent fashion. There have long been a few such positions in Australian government where pol

Paying the price of infamy

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Edition 3SUN 09 FEB 1997, Page 126 Paying the price of infamy By RICHARD FARMER   WHEN you choose to take a job where you determine for people what is best for them, it should not surprise you that there is a price to be paid. Being in public life inevitably means that your life becomes far more public than that of an ordinary citizen. Even the politicians last week pretending outrage at the publication of some pictures embarrassing to one of their own would concede that much. Which is why the attack on the newspapers is for their invading the privacy of the wife of Senator Bob Woods rather than that of the resigning senator himself. Yet in truth it ever was, and ever will be, impossible to insulate the families of politicians from the consequences of the actions of the politicians. It is rather like, I suppose, that the families of a convicted murderer end up having to live with the embarrassment of having been close to the killer. It was not their fault that they were thrust in to

Minority poised for victory

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Edition 1SUN 02 FEB 1997, Page 047 Minority poised for victory By RICHARD FARMER   THE moral minority is on the verge of a horrible victory. While the opinion pollsters might tell us an overwhelming majority of Australians favour voluntary euthanasia, the Federal Parliament is about to veto a Northern Territory law that allows it. The House of Representatives has already voted that way and the Senate is almost certainly going to follow suit. Yet again, what the people think is being proved irrelevant. There are two reasons that occur to me in explanation of the willingness of our elected members of parliament to ignore the views of those they are elected to represent. The first is the unfortunate ability of a minority which feels strongly about a question to influence MPs in a way that a sensible majority never can. Very few, if any, of the 75 per cent of ordinary Australians who support euthanasia would switch their vote from one candidate to another on the basis of this issue alone

Why parties can't govern

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Edition 1SUN 19 JAN 1997, Page 049 Why parties can't govern By RICHARD FARMER   WESTERN Australia provides the latest example of a fundamental problem affecting the way this country is run. We have a parliamentary system predicated on there being two parties, one of which becomes the government and the other the Opposition. But parliaments are elected in a way which regularly gives third forces a balance of power. The result is governments that cannot govern. West Australian Premier Richard Court is in that position. He was returned to office last month after his Liberal-National coalition increased its majority in the Lower House, where the government is decided. It was a clear endorsement. But quite perversely, proportional representation resulted in minor parties and Labor ending up with as many members in the Upper House as the Government. There is an an element of rough justice in this. The Labor governments that preceded Mr Court's were always in the same predicament. I

Year ends on note of hope

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Edition 1SUN 05 JAN 1997, Page 048 Year ends on note of hope By RICHARD FARMER   THE two governments in Canberra, federal and local, ended 1996 in ways that give some hope of changes for the better in the way Australia is governed. Prime Minister John Howard's government managed to end up with a privatised Telstra and at least some changes to industrial-relations laws because of the creation of a second group of Senate power-holders. And Chief Minister Kate Carnell's minority ACT government defied all expectations by legislating to change land administration with the support of the Labor Opposition. The example from the junior Canberra legislature was perhaps the more significant, for here was a rare example of an Opposition acting in a way that was against its own immediate electoral interests. In the national capital, as elsewhere, people upset by a change are prone to alter the way they cast their next vote -and there are few things more controversial than changes to the r