Australia is the greatest place on earth because...

Shannow said:
So you'll hand out $75k in welfare to rich Mums to be and tax the top end of business to get it ?

You old conservative you.
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Yes. I'll hand out $75,000 to in welfare to rich mums. Personally. :Smug:

Chump change compared to the $175,000,000 on a 'green loan' scheme that went nowhere. Or $80,000,000 on administering an ETS which doesn't even exist yet. Or $125,000,000 on a mandatory internet filter conjured by someone with literally no telco or IT experience or education prior to being handed the "Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy" portfolio. A filter which is not only ridiculously ineffectual but indirectly aids the supposed primary motivators for the filter. A filter which will run over the $43,000,000,000 (yep, count those zeros) 'national broadband network' with enough political, commercial and technological holes in it that it should be dubbed the Swiss Cheese Network. How about those 'stimulus packages' eh? Money well spent? How about the 'Henry T Ford education revolution' recently discussed on here - we'll happily invest in improving anything in your school as long as it's black. And a hall. No, really, you need a new hall. How about those fuel and grocery watchdogs? How much more are we paying for FOB welfare ever since KRudd settled in?

If not enjoying watching the government piss away money we don't even have and plunging the nation into ridiculous levels of debt with sweet fuck all of substance to show for it makes me a conservative then you can all suck my proudly 'conservative' cock.

Criticising Abbott for 'policy on the run' is like shooting fish in a barrel. He's in a shit-house position no matter what he does. If he takes too much time planning things, he's indecisive. If he's decisive, he's just spontaneous and doesn't think things through. Even if he gets things 100% spot on, it's inevitably contradicting something one or more of the four Liberal leaders in this term alone has put forth and is a sign of continued party instability and inconsistency. He can't win no matter what he does. The next election still remains KRudd's to lose, and he almost certainly won't because the shit from his cash whoring won't hit the fan by then, and 'Honest Kev' still has half the nation wrapped around his pinkies on the back of his surplus packages alone. Abbott is an impotent tool, whereas Krudd is genuinely dangerous.

Side note: why can't Krudd answer a single fucking question without using the word "frankly"?
 
Maybe "hopeless" is too strong a word. He stopped our country sliding into recession like most of the rest of the world. How he did it might not have been exactly fiscally responsible and put the country into massive debt, but our economic situation probably would have been far worse had the stimulus not occured. He does have to contend with a hostile Senate, mainly in the shape of Stephen Fielding, one of the most unpredictable and politically irresponsible people in parliament. But a lot of his policies seem to involve splashing around massive sums of cash without a great deal of thought as to their execution. He put a rookie minister in charge of a scheme that should have had a completely different department looking after it, and pushes ahead with things like internet filters and school grading systems which have been comprehensively shown to not work. There are even massive flaws in his proposed health reform package that won't actually help the areas that need help most that he fails to address or even seems to notice, a package that relies on being passed through the Senate and being signed off by the States, who will be obliged to hand back 30% of their tax revenue, something which two States have already said they won't do. Meanwhile, most of the other shit he said he was going to do either hasn't been done because it was simply too hard, or is being implemented so slowly that my kids will be adults before it happens.

That said, I can't imagine the social impact on low-mid income earners, people dependent on welfare and a good percentage of our basic human rights if Abbott's crowd somehow falls over the line. If there's one thing that worries me more than centre-right left wingers, it's right-wing Conservatives.
 
^^ like what gorey said. Rudd's & labour are certainly fucking up a lot of things... some good ideas shockingly executed, and some just plain bad ideas that they for some reason persist in pushing ahead with.

That being said though, it's better than another term of Howard + Work Choices, but a LONG way.
 
The Mean Fiddler case should have scared the pants off every person in the country, and seen people sacked, the way they wanted Garret sacked (and reasonably so IMO).

If an employer is managing a business, he can sack any lackluster performer, as long as he can prove his case. Seen it recently, and the unions won't even bark if a slackarse with documented slackarsery gets the arse.
 
Goreripper said:
WorkChoices would have screwed this country. Especially as the GFC hit less than 12 months after the election. People would have been losing their jobs like they meant nothing.
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Totally agree, that being said , my Father worked for an engineering firm for 27 years, was made to sign the "work choices" contract and when the company decided to go overseas to China he was made redundant , his payout was just under 4 months pay.
Now how can a guy who is 67 and was happily working take a multinational company to court over that!
It wasnt work choices at all , there was no balance .
I nearly had the arse last year because the company I work for was going quiet , thankfully I stayed and luckily we werent made to sign the "work choices" paperwork years previously.
Thankfully those who did go were given voluntary separation packages and the company is now going well , i cant say that I wasnt shit scared for a while because the shift I was a leading hand on completely closed down .
I am a valued worker where I work and I do a fucken good job of it , but if push came to shove then I would have been stuffed.
 
If an employer is managing a business, he can sack any lackluster performer, as long as he can prove his case. Seen it recently, and the unions won't even bark if a slackarse with documented slackarsery gets the arse.[/QUOTE]

The only thing I have seen the union I am with do this year is put up the membership fee :Smug:
 
My point was that the unions now (and I like this) won't defend the indefensible.

Seen cases years ago when 700 people would walk off the job because someone was caught drinking on the job. These days, the unions wouldn't touch it with a stick.
 
Shannow said:
My point was that the unions now (and I like this) won't defend the indefensible.

Seen cases years ago when 700 people would walk off the job because someone was caught drinking on the job. These days, the unions wouldn't touch it with a stick.
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And so they shouldnt touch it with a stick , to have a fuckwit drink on the job and then have the union call for a walkout because of it is stupid , the silly bastard should have been dismissed on the spot for something so stupid and the workplace continue on as usual .
 
Unions don't need to be like that now because the workplace regulations they fought for to protect the workers are in place. Old school unionists were hard-arses because they needed to be. They can still be churlish if they need to be, but all the parties know things work better when they work together. Conservatives like to downplay the union movement nowadays, but it got rid of Howard and is already jumping on Abbott as one of the architects of WorkChoices and the election is months away. If WorkChoices ever happens, the unions will bring Australia to a stand-still.
 
Here's the first part of the Wikipedia entry about WorkChoices:

"The Workplace Relations Act 1996, as amended by the Workplace Relations Amendment Act 2005, or WorkChoices, which came into effect in March 2006, was a policy which involved many controversial amendments to the Workplace Relations Act, the main federal statute which regulates industrial relations in Australia.
WorkChoices was passed by the Howard Government in 2005 and was said to improve employment levels and national economic performance by dispensing unfair dismissal laws for companies under a certain size, removing the "no disadvantage test" which had sought to ensure workers were not left disadvantaged by changes in legislation, and requiring workers submit their certified agreements directly to Workplace Authority rather than going through the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. Additional factors aimed at increasing economic performance included clauses significantly compromising a workforce's ability to legally go on strike, requiring workers to bargain for previously-guaranteed conditions without collectivised representation, and significantly restricting trade union activity and recruitment on the worksite."

It basically diminished the role unions had in negotiating wages and conditions, made it easier for businesses with under 101 staff to sack people (for virtually no reason), reduced the number of allowable matters to be covered by pay awards and basically tried to outlaw industry-wide industrial action. The main impact was on workers who were signed to Australian Workplace Agreements - contracts between individual workers and their bosses. Under WorkChoices, many of the conditions they were supposed to include got removed and a lot of employers forced workers to sign new ones which took away a lot of their rights. Again from wiki:

"[the Workplace Authority] conducted a survey ending in September 2006 which showed the following results with respect to 'protected' conditions lost in WorkChoices legislation: of all AWAs sampled, 88 percent abolished or 'modified' overtime rates; 89 percent of AWAs either abolished or 'modified' shiftwork loading; 91 percent abolished or 'modified' monetary allowances; 85 percent abolished or 'modified incentive payments; 82 percent abolished or 'modified' public holiday payments; and 83 percent abolished or 'modified' rest breaks. In each of these cases conditions were more often abolished than modified, and all modifications represented decreases in conditions. Lastly, though 66 percent of AWAs resulted in wage increases, 52 percent of these increases were unquantified or not guaranteed."

The AWAs were technically illegal, but there were so many of them that it would have taken years to sort them all out. Just read that again:

"83 percent abolished or 'modified' rest breaks"

Bosses were basically getting people to sign contracts that didn't even allow them to take breaks. And unions weren't allowed to enter a premise to assist with negotiations. Some workers were told they had to sign or be fired (which was illegal) and new staff had to sign before they would be hired (which was legal). Put it this way, the legislation was so rushed and badly thought-out, even the HR Nicholls Society, a New Right conservative group didn't like it, although that was mainly because they felt it regulated the industrial relations system too much.
 
Also note there that it says it was meant "to improve employment levels and national economic performance". By allowing sleaze-bag owners of small companies to fire people more easily, it would somehow improve employment levels. Because bosses thought WorkChoices allowed them to diddle their workers out of everything (which, to be fair, it actually didn't, but bosses were reading it that way), it actually caused more hassles than the old system because the amount of AWAs that were being produced that were illegal would have tied up the Workplace Authority for years. Rudd's insulation initiative is a minor quibble compared to the mess this would have created.
 
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q...iiX85A&sig=AHIEtbTyMYbjRqYFSiAb41huI6y79k_DiA

Employees of the Mean Fiddler (popular Irish pub in Sydeny's west) turned up on ANZAC Day and were presented their new AWA.

It abolished penalty rates, and gave some extra cents per hour for the new flat rate. Employees were told that they were not to discuss their new AWAs outside work, and that to talk to the media would result in dismissal.

Meantime, the pub still charged their 10% public holiday surcharge.

Joe Hockey suggested that the affected employees suck eggs. Well not wuite, that they should raise their concerns with the appropriate authority, to have it investigated fully.
 
No, it's not in existence anymore. Rudd tore it up when he got in, so all the AWAs that were signed under WorkChoices were made invalid and had to be re-negotiated. The Mean Fiddler was the most outrageous example, but there was also other places, like some franchises of the haberdashery chain Spotlight, and also the Chilis restaurant chain from memory.
 
it's not totally resolved though, because any company that was incorporated during the workchoices period is still subject to those laws. For example I was in security, and a new company took over the contract and re-employed the majority of the staff. We were supposed to be on federal award conditions (ie, shift loading, weekend penalty rates, public holiday rates etc) but the company was dodgy and would try to get away with not paying us various conditions if they thought we wouldn't notice (or wouldn't have the balls to stand up to them). I ended up taking them to the workplace ombudsman, but was told they had no authority to enforce anything on the company, as they were incorporated in 2007. It's not actually that they were a new company either, just like a heap of other dodgy motherfuckers they re-badged themselves in 2007 to take advantage of the new legislation.

Suffice to say I up and quit, and let the client know why i was quitting as well. The client was pretty pissed off since I was one of the guys they had wanted to keep.

This sort of thing will be an ongoing legacy of the Howard / Work Choices era for some time to come.
 
A guy in my office is in hospital after being stabbed on his way to work this morning. Move here Bev, you'll feel right at home.
 
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