Where there is unity there is always victory, the 1st century Roman philosopher Publilius Syrus famously observed. That is also how the Prime Minister, John Howard, sees it. Now that the Government controls the Senate, nothing is more important to its reform agenda than internal cohesion. However, forging loyalty is not as simple as pulling rank and bringing errant Coalition members to heel. Mr Howard's blunt warning that loyalty to the party room comes first was clearly aimed at the Queensland Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce. As such, it was offensive not just to the rookie senator's constituents, but to the wider community. The first loyalty of any politician should be to the voters; the job of an elected representative is to represent the electors. Real unity, and the power it undoubtedly confers, is not found in blind allegiance to the party line, but in intelligent, informed debate that accommodates diverging views. Does Mr Howard believe his MPs are so out of touch with their electorates that he can afford to dismiss their complaints? The core issue is not party-room discipline, but substantive public concerns about key Coalition policies.
It is laudable to want to streamline and simplify a complex industrial relations, but Mr Howard must acknowledge the considerable apprehension about likely working conditions in the flexible workplace of the future. Likewise, the sale of Telstra. Despite reassurances, services in the bush are simply not up to scratch. The Government must do better than guess how much cash must be earmarked from the Telstra sale to assuage the Nationals and push the sale through. There should be an objective assessment of what services need long-term guarantees and how much it will cost to fund them. The estimates of $2 billion to $5 billion seem to have been plucked from the air.
The determination of the Howard Government to abolish compulsory student union fees at universities is even more fraught. It is reasonable for the Government to oppose compulsory imposts on students to finance political activities on campus. Equally, it is understandable that some students object to paying for services they do not use. But the user-pays principle is not an absolute; we do not accept, for example, that people should not have to pay council rates because they do not use all a council's services. The belated recognition by some rural MPs of the damage that voluntary unionism may do to regional universities applies equally to institutions in the cities if they lose sporting and cultural activities and student services.
The Coalition is a broad church, as the recent compromise over children in detention clearly illustrated. Mr Howard has said the Coalition will use its expanded Senate powers "wisely, soberly and sensibly". The new powers bring new responsibilities for even greater care and diligence. This means a proper airing for dissent, not closing it down with jingostic appeals to loyalty and unity. However, dissidents such as Senator Joyce, who find their own power enhanced in the new Senate, also face an important test. There can be a fine line between championing the constituents and holding the party room to ransom. It should not be crossed.
Shuttle back in one piece
Space travel is risky even if pieces do not fall off the spacecraft. When a space shuttle is launched, the astronauts are sitting on 3000 tonnes of highly explosive rocket fuel, hoping it will blast them into space, not blow them up. When they return, the shuttle glows like a meteorite as it re-enters the atmosphere at 27,000kmh , its belly heating to 1275 degrees. Sensible people would stay on the ground. Exploration, however, has always been more about courage than good sense.
The most worrying aspect of the Discovery's just-concluded mission is that it saw a repeat of the very problem that caused the Columbia to explode in February 2003. The Columbia disintegrated on re-entry because of damage from a piece of insulating foam that had broken from its external fuel tank during take-off. Despite 2½ years' research, the same problem beset the Discovery when foam broke off its fuel tank as it took off. If those chunks of foam had seriously damaged the craft's thermal tiles, there was no guarantee the crew could have fixed the problem (unlike that wayward strip of material between the tiles). Discovery's crew might so easily have met the same fate as Columbia's.
The space shuttle is a work in progress. Despite more than 100 flights over a quarter of a century, new faults continue to be discovered, and endemic problems - such as debris from the fuel tank being swept against the shuttle - simply refuse to be fixed. While the shuttle is the most sophisticated aircraft ever produced, technologically it struggles to meet the enormous demands on it. The NASA chief, Michael Griffin, concedes that shuttle missions are "just barely possible". Yet that bare possibility is an irresistible invitation to NASA and its astronauts. Already, NASA is back at work on the problem of the tiles before the planned launch of the Atlantis later this year.
Between now and the shuttle's scheduled retirement in 2010, NASA plans to spend $13 billion developing a new craft for manned space flights. The hazards and the enormous cost have the agency's critics increasingly questioning the need to risk astronauts where NASA might send machines. The US President, George Bush, who promises to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020, has an answer to that. Machines, Mr Bush says, are mere trailblazers. As humans, he says, "we have to see for ourselves". The same spirit ensures there will be no shortage of astronauts willing to risk all in the space shuttle as soon as NASA gives the all-clear.