A Bill of Rights for Australia?

Do you trust the government to adequately defend your rights, or would you prefer to see your rights enshrined in law?

I for one would prefer to see my rights enshrined in law.

Believe it or not Australia is the only western country that doesn't have a bill of rights. I think it's about time that changed.

In the wake of the September 11th attacks in 2001 a raft of anti-terrorism laws were introduced some of which may curb terrorism but in reality could also be used to curb dissent or silence critics. We've already had people deported with out any due process or the relevant ministers having to account for their actions. Our spineless opposition didn't oppose our "anti-terrorism" laws. I think the root of this is the politicians fear of appearing to be "soft on crime".

The greatest threat to our liberty is not terrorism, it is the state. The protection we have from the state is the rule of law and the separation of the judiciary and executive. Rule of law protects us against arbitrary decisions by the bureaucracy and executive that could adversely affect our life. Possibly the most important protection is against deprivation of liberty except by due process. But above all this must sit a bill of rights that prevents laws from being enacted that could erode our liberty, all we really have is the "good will" of our politicians and their self proclaimed wisdom.

As of 2008 we've already had someone (Dr Haneef) who was detained under these laws on virtually no evidence at all. Once the Federal Police had detained Dr Haneef they waited several days to question him. He eventually obtained bail, through the strenuous efforts of his solicitor. But when he was due to be released the immigration minister acting by executive fiat (there was no due process) revoked Haneef's visa so that he could be deported, presumably to prevent embarrassment to the government and Federal Police. Subsequent inquiries have established that Dr Haneef had no case to answer.

Fortunately some states and territories in Australia have started to enacting a bills of rights. They could be overridden by the Federal Government if it felt it necessary to do so.

Politicians are generally very reluctant when it comes to bills of rights. There are many reasons cited but the most frequent seems to be "A Bill of Rights would be undemocratic to give unelected judges the power to override the judgment of parliament." This plays on the public's low opinion of lawyers. There's nothing democratic about politicians and bureaucrats removing our liberty without any check on their action. All other democracies have bills of rights and as far as I can tell they all function just fine.

Having thought about Bills of Rights for a while I came up with my own bill of rights, somewhat palgarised from the US Bill of Rights. It's not perfect and I'm sure a junior solicitor could pick it to pieces. Some possibly overlap as well.

Definitions
Government = Federal, State, Territory or any other law making body.

• Freedom of speech

The Government shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or right to publish such speech; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

• No search or seizure without warrant

The right of the people to be secure in their persons and property, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or property to be seized.

• Freedom from surveillance, right to privacy
  

The right of the people to be free from unwarranted surveillance whilst conducting their lawful business shall not be infringed.

• Due Process

A person accused of a crime has the right to legal counsel and to public trial by jury of his or her peers without excessive delay. A person accused of a crime has the right not to be a witness against themselves and to examine all evidence and witnesses against them. A person found not guilty of a crime shall not be tried again for the same crime except when new evidence is uncovered. Excessive bail, cruel and unusual punishments shall not be imposed.

• The right to die at a time of own choice

The right of a terminally ill person to make a free choice to die at a time and manner of their choosing shall not be infringed.

• Freedom of information

The right of persons to examine any government document, or accurate facsimile of, shall not be withheld except when exposure of such document would jeopardise national security. All government documents provided under this right shall be provided without monetary charge or unreasonable delay.

• Separation of Church and State
  

The government shall make no law abridging the freedom to practice a religion and nor shall any law be passed favoring any religion, or religious belief.

• Deprivation of Liberty
  

No person shall be deprived of their liberty except when found guilty of a crime that under common law would warrant a prison sentence or when held in remand before a trial. A person arrested and detained for a crime shall be charged or released without undue delay.

All rights not enumerated here shall be assumed to belong to the people.

This Bill of Rights can only be amended by popular referendum where the number of vote cast in favour is at least 75 percent plus 1 vote of the votes cast.

Unix Haters Handbook

I have just read the Unix Haters Guide which I found quite by accident whilst looking for a way to turn off an annoying feature in TOAD (an expensive tool for Oracle developers). It was a most enlightening book. I had no idea that Unix was so shonky. In short it is a pretty damning indictment of Unix.

I came to Unix from MS-DOS in the early 1990’s. I discovered, for example, that the toy operating system I’d been using had file and record locking capabilities whereas the real one didn’t. Even worse every program is apparently expected to implement it's own file locking routines; great until some other program (such as "remove files") just blithly does it stuff to your file because it is ignorant of your program.

Unix is written in C which may be ok for operating systems but is a not a great language to program in when it comes to applications. Needless to say just about every application program for Unix is written in C which lacks just about everything a good programming language is supposed to have such as array bounds checking. Fortunately I haven't ever had to do anything in C++ which is a lot worse to use apparently. Before I started using Unix I’d been using Turbo Pascal, a brilliant low cost development tool with a debugger that was years ahead of anything that was available on Unix.

Some bugs (or poor design features) in Unix persist for decades. The book accuses developers of being reluctant to fix a problem, consequently users work around the problem and now it is impossible to fix the problem because the users work arounds will break. I recently read about a bug in a Unix type system that had finally been fixed after 33 years (yes that's 33 years). Take the utility "make" for example. This utility reads a "makefile" which contains instructions on how to build a computer program without rebuilding the bits that haven't changed. The build instructions must be prefixed with a "tab" character. Not obvious if you view a "makefile" in a standard text editor, this requirement isn't obvious. If you don't know about it you could end up prefixing your instructions with 8 spaces and wondering why the make utility doesn't work and spits out some unintelligible error message. I struck this problem when I first tried to use make.

Ever tried to configure Unix? It has a multitude of configuration files in inconsistent formats, scattered around the /etc directory and its sub directories, it can also be difficult to find out what needs to be changed when you wish to configure something in particular. I don't know how people managed before Google.

Just out of curiosity I had a look at the sendmail manual. I decided it wasn’t worth it after reading about 1 page of the manual. It seems you need to write a configuration file and run this through some sort of generator to get a sendmail configuration file! WTF?

I've tried of some of the simple methods detailed in the book for crashing Unix, in the safety of a Virtual Machine, and they work well.

The authors of the book cite an announcement that Unix and C are a hoax. This apparently is an April fools joke.

Having said all that I've recently installed a Linux on my PC and will gradually be shifting my stuff off the Windows treadmill over in the next few months. The version of Linux (PCLinuxOS) I use is easy to configure, fortunately, and the user is shielded from having to mess about text files.

I'll probably be a bit more skeptical about Unix being an "advanced operating system" in future.

You can obtain this book in pdf form via this link http://www.simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf

Petrol Price Hysteria

If you live in the western world you are no doubt experiencing a lot of hysteria about the rising cost of petrol. In Australia vast amounts of parliamentary time have been wasted on debating possible measures that at best will affect the price of petrol by a few cents per litre. The news is full of angst about the cost of filling up.

But, there are many costs of owning a motor car and petrol certainly not the highest part, it could be argued that it is the most "visible" component. The biggest cost is buying the car and the depreciation involved, made even worse if the purchase is financed with borrowed money.

An example

A 2003 Ford Falcon Futura, $35,000 new, resale value $11,000 (at best) in 2008. That's $4,800 (in depreciation) per year, add an additional $1,920 per year if the full purchase amount is borrowed over 5 years at a 10% interest rate. Driving this car 15,000km* per year costs $2,086 in petrol per year at $1.60 per litre (June 2008) if 11.5 litres per 100km is achieved. We'll only get petrol price relief immediately if the car is replaced by something costing no more than what we get if we sell the Falcon.

Let's look at the real cost of replacing this car and assume that petrol is $2.00 per litre, a price that may achieved this year in Australia but still a lot cheaper than in Europe.

If we look at what is most likely to happen, the car is replaced by something that costs more than the resale value of the car it replaces. Suppose the gas guzzler is replaced by a European size sedan with a 2 litre (or smaller) engine. A search around the web finds many second hand cars that are about 2 years old and costing less than $17,000. Using a Ford Focus as an example, this car achieves 7.1litres/100km (combined), 6.8litres/100km on the motorway, saving 4.4 litres per 100km (11.5 - 7.1). This saving has to repay $6,000 and and extra $1,620 (if this money is borrowed over 5 years at 10% interest) before we get ahead, we have to travel about 68,000 km or 86,600km, if borrowing is factored in, at $2 per litre before we start making a saving.

As a slight digression the oil companies are constantly accused of operating a cartel however, petrol retaining in Australia is a highly competitive low margin business. The last inquiry conducted by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission was conducted in 2007 and no cartel was discovered. Petrol prices rise and fall cyclically, Tuesday (in Brisbane) being the best day to buy petrol; if you don't mind waiting in long queues, burning your potential saving whilst you do (most people seem to be content to idle their engines rather than switching them off whilst waiting). When I was traveling in the USA in 2007 there was a lot of angst as the price of petrol approached US$3 per gallon. Naturally the oil companies were being accused of operating a cartel. The real reason is that no refineries have been built in the USA in the last 30 years and the USA has to import petrol. Why would an oil company spend billions building a refinery when they are able to run the existing refineries at capacity supplying a commodity that is increasing in price? No single oil company is going go out on a limb and put their shareholders at a disadvantage compared to its competitors.

Why I'm not replacing my gas guzzling old car purely to reduce my expenditure on petrol.

I will eventually have to replace my car but it won't be because it uses a lot of petrol. I own a 1986 Ford Fairmont. This car is a classic Australian gas guzzler. I get about 13 litres per 100km (18mpg US, 22mpg UK) for motorway driving. I haven't measured its consumption around town as I do very little of that. From searching around the web it is probably in the region of 16 litres per 100km (15mpg US, 17.5mpg UK). As I have owned this car since 1996 and its yearly depreciation is low and it's residual value is virtually zero. Suppose I replace it with a second hand Ford Focus as above. Firstly, I'd be out of pocket by $17,000 before buying any petrol, it would be even worse if I had to borrow the money (an extra $4,660 at 10% over 5 years). At $2 per litre that amount of money will buy 8,500 litres of petrol; enough to drive my car 53,125 km around town (16l/100km) and I'd need to travel just over 95,500 km to recover this money by reduced fuel consumption. Even if petrol were $3 per litre we'd still looking at a pay back period of that can be measured in years.

I actually do about 14,000 km per year, mostly on motorways so applying the above calculation I'd save about 6.2 litres/100km. I'd have to travel 137,096 km at $2 per litre before I start to break even, nearly 10 years of motoring.

My calculations are quite simplistic and don't take account of inflation. My point is that just buying a car to reduce petrol consumption is actually an expensive thing to do. In my experience cheaper motoring is achieved by buying a good second hand car without borrowing money and keeping it for a long time. If you do the same calculations on a hybrid car you'd probably find it even more expensive, apparently the batteries have to be replaced every 3 years and it costs a lot more than filling your tank.

* This figure comes from a recent article on the opinion page in the Australian on 20/6/2008. The figure is 7,500km per capita per year. I'm assuming 2 adults per car.