National Interest

The National Interest round-up begins in Western Australia, where a prominent union official has defended his decision to give a membership contact list to a telelmarketing mortgage-broker from the Gold Coast.

CFMEU Secretary Kevin Reynolds gave the contact list to the firm Members Alliance in 2006 and the company then began calling union members at home to offer them finance for investment opportunities in Queensland.

According to The Sunday Times, Mr Reynolds says his union has "not received one cent" in payment for providing the contacts and the decision to hand over members details was made by the union executive because Members Alliance offered "a good service".

Mr Reynolds thinks it's disgraceful that the media want to make something of the fact that Members Alliance is run by the son of his close friend, former Labor Minister Norm Marlborough... That's the same Mr Marlborough who was sacked from his portfolio for leaking confidential government information to lobbyist Brian Burke.

Membership lists are a bit of a sensitive issue at the WA branch of the CFMEU these days, where another official has been sacked after being accused of misusing members contact details.

Darren Kavanagh is being pursued by the union's lawyers for the alleged theft of the mailing list after he sent a flyer to 7000 members asking them to vote for him at forthcoming elections - vote for him, rather than Kevin Reynolds, as union secretary.

A tourist industry worker in Darwin is taking the law into his own hands. Darren Pleuger is worried about the road toll, so he's decided to name and shame drivers who break the law.

When Mr Pleuger sees a car speeding or illegally parked in spot reserved for the disabled, he takes down the vehicle details and posts them online - a description of the car, its rego number, the time date and nature of the infringement and if possible the name of the driver. And as the NT News reports, the road safety vigilante is urging other Territorians to aid his quest to dob in dodgy drivers.

But a word of caution - The Mercury in Hobart reports that a video shop is being taken to court by four people whose pictures were put on public display as suspected shop lifters.

The New Town video shop used footage from its surveillance cameras to identify the alleged perpetrators, print out mug shots and them paste them up on the front counter.

One woman - who denies pinching anything from the store - says she wondered why people were staring at her in the supermarket, until she realised that she had on the same jacket and was carrying the same handbag as in the surveillance photo.

Video store owner Terry Ewing says posting up the images has significantly reduced theft, and he might introduce the practice to his other stores around the state.

But prominent Tasmanian lawyer Greg Barns reckons such photo displays could breach criminal law by interfering with a police investigation. If pictures feature children - as some of the video store images do - that could contravene the Youth Justice Act, and the store owner is putting himself and his staff at risk of defamation action.

We've all heard of student cheats plagerising essays on the internet. It's such a serious problem that plagiarism detection software is now widely used in universities. But that won't help with a new problem: outsourcing.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that enterprising computer science students have twigged to the fact that they can pay programmers in lower wage countries to complete their assignments. No more slogging away at boring coding: just put the assignment out to tender and a subcontinental whiz-kid will do the job for you.

There are now websites devoted to matching rich and lazy students with low-cost coders offshore. The market at work.

Presenter

Peter Mares

Producer

James Panichi