After being fairly quiet lately, I thought I had better make an effort to put up an election eve post to sum up the campaigns and tell you how I recommend you vote tomorrow. In truth, IR did not feature very much in the campaign. The parties’ positions have had a lot of publicity over [...]
The Government has pinned its hopes on industrial relations, and especially the union movement’s influence on Labor. But it was caught lying about some ALP members, and pretending that student politics counts as industrial unionism. Besides, voters know that the Liberal frontbenches are stuffed full of business lawyers, while union leaders bring a range of [...]
The Government’s reds-under-the-bed fear campaign has been kicked up a notch, with Peter Costello accusing Julia Gillard of being a closet Communist. And isn’t it awful that Labor’s candidates come from a tradition of representing Australian workers and their families? Seriously, if the ALP was in the pockets of the unions, wouldn’t the ACTU guarantee [...]
The election has been called for Saturday, 24 November. That means the clock is ticking on your electoral enrolment. The deadline for new enrolments is this Wednesday, 17 October, at 8:00pm, so there isn’t much time. Don’t assume you are correctly enrolled. Visit the AEC’s Check Your Details page to make absolutely sure you have [...]
“Are you now or have you ever been…?” was the joking title of a recent post at Larvatus Prodeo. It was responding to a despicable Government/Gazette tag-team attack on academics whose research found that WorkChoices and AWAs were slashing wages. Because there was no basis for attacking the merits of the findings, the research team [...]
Wow. In April 2006 I wrote that the Employer Advisor Program was an anti-union slush fund, with the Howard Government “blatantly tipping a bucket of money into the business lobby’s coffers, to subsidise its anti-union campaigns”. A year later, in April 2007, I pointed out that Julia Gillard thought business would be expected to run [...]
John Howard made news recently by putting a couple of dull speeches up on YouTube, and Kevin Rudd has launched a big site to sells bumper stickers. As Mark has pointed out, these token efforts don’t really take the online plunge, they just move the same old campaign from talkback and letters pages to a [...]
The business lobby today launched its election propaganda campaign. The president of the Business Council of Australia, Michael Chaney, made the laughable claim that the ads are non-political, but Australians saw through the last “information” campaign and they’ll see through this one, too. The leader of the Liberal Party tells business they had better spend [...]
Last week we learned that the new head of the Workplace Authority, Barbara Bennett, was not hired because she is capable of protecting workers, but because she fit the advertising agencies’ criteria for a propaganda “figurehead”. Now we know that her face on the screen hasn’t done anything to convince people that job insecurity is [...]
A secret Government report has been leaked to the press, revealing details of research on the public’s opinion of WorkChoices. Some of the comments from focus group participants include: “It’s like there’s a guillotine over our heads. Stability is gone.” “The kids will think it’s great to get five days’ annual leave and a bowl [...]
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