Write on
Australian republic
The renewed initiative to create an overdue Australian republic and the federal government's desire to improve black-white relations should be combined to create a proper starting point for such a venture.
Apart from being a realistic reflection of our multicultural society, marking our independence from a Britain becoming part of a United Nations of Europe and finally settling us in South-East Asia, an Australian republic would be more acceptable to the Aboriginal people who associate the present arrangement with physical and cultural genocide.
Michael Rose-Schwab
Rapid Creek NT
Police law-breaking
The ABC's 7.30 Report of 31 July on the subject of police violence in Victoria raises once again the disturbing problem of the apparent impunity of police when it comes to breaking the law.
It also highlights the unsuitability of police to oversee the issuing and licensing of firearms. These should be the responsibility of some impartial body and police who are required to be armed should have to justify that requirement to such a body on each occasion.
This unsuitability has been further confirmed by the appalling revelation that the Northern Territory police who are alleged to have facilitated the illegal obtaining of pistols by misrepresentation are not to face charges under the law for their actions.
Nice little club, what?
C.M. Friel
Alawa NT
National green party
I've decided to write following Lisa Macdonald's and Karen Fletcher's article "Top-down agenda set for green party" (GLW 7/8/91). Given that the Democratic Socialist Party does not support the formation of a coherent national Green political organisation/network, it should not be a surprise to find that DSP members have not been consulted on its development. However, I had expected a modicum of professional journalism from Â鶹´«Ã½, as a supposedly non-party-line newspaper. Reporting on the national Greens process has been characterised by exaggeration, partisan use of facts and an inability to actually interview anybody who knows what's going on instead relying on the verbal DSP members' network and the odd circulated letter.
Now, I'd like to briefly explain how this national Greens process has developed, according to my understanding. Since there has been no working together nationally to-date, there was a problem in initiating a national meeting. The five convenors (I'd prefer to call them sponsors), Jo Vallentine, Bob Brown, Drew Hutton, Steve Brigham and Hall Greenland, in backing a meeting, provided some credibility and a degree of nationwide representation.
In late May/early June my impression was that the process had become stalled, becoming hung up on such things as determining voting strengths. The meeting of NSW Greens on July 6 produced a breakthrough in that we developed a formulation for inviting participants to a national meeting (a form of proscription + an organisation of autonomous parties) that was then accepted on a national teleconference on July 8. This teleconference scheduled the July 30 teleconference to review the process and finalise the national meeting agenda. Thus the July 30 teleconference was not "initiated from WA at short notice" because the proposal circulated by me was "unacceptable". Following the acceptance of the NSW proposal and the invitation list on the teleconference, I sent out the so-called "Hine letter". r was sent to most of the convenors for their amendment, including Drew Hutton, before the final version was mailed out.
The national meeting will take place in Sydney over August 17-18 and I expect that some form of working group will be elected to facilitate teleconferences and meetings for the future. At this point the convenors are relieved of the admirable task that they took on themselves in April.
The article in GL has the headline, "top-down agenda set" and yet there is no mention in the text of what has been decided for the agenda. The minutes have yet to arrive from WA but I understand from a verbal report that, in accord with usual meeting practice, the draft agenda that was agreed to on the teleconference will be put to the meeting of August 17-18 for acceptance or amendment before it proceeds.
I resent GL's attempts to drive wedges between honest participants in the national Greens initiative. The phone numbers of most of the participants are widely available and I suggest to people writing for GL that they should step out of their self-serving ghetto and seek the facts from the direct participants.
Doug Hine
Sydney
[Doug Hine's first quotation of the headline is the correct one. It clearly refers to an agenda for a green party, not the agenda for the August 17-18 meeting. The first paragraph of the article also made this clear.
As is repeated on page 2 of every issue of Â鶹´«Ã½, signed articles represent the views of their authors, not of GL. — Editor.]
NZ identity card
Here the increasingly insane government has just enacted a law to make everyone who earns less than NZ$17,000 a year carry an ID card, upon which all the significant government files will be merged. So, for instance, such people will be the subject to intensified Inland Revenue surveillance, via the comprehensive state security dossiers to be held on them.
Above $17,000 a year, normal civil liberties will continue to apply, and this better class, the majority of the population, will not have to carry an ID card and can fiddle the Revenue in peace.
This bizarre and slightly sinister scheme was first mooted as a budget-night hypothetical — then unexpectedly enacted into law two days later. The usual South American coup d'etat approach, that has come to be applied to all important constitutional legislation here. None of your lengthy Australian stuffing around!
Chris Harris
Auckland