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 [...]
As Michael Bachelard pointed out in The Age recently, the ABCC was ostensibly set up to deal with organised crime in the building industry — yet “almost two years after the ABCC was set up as a statutory commission, not one alleged organised criminal has been charged.” Instead, it uses its extraordinary powers to persecute [...]
An employer in the film industry has admitted paying his staff illegal, below-award wages, and has been caught on tape making threats of violence against a union official. Film producer Brad Diebert rang the MEAA’s Simon Whipp: How dare you say we have the money to pay actors more money… fuck you, spreading shit like [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The Howard Government’s union-busting ABCC released a report (pdf) today claiming that smashing unions is good for the economy. Needless to say, The Australian ran hard with the story, giving it the front page, an opinion piece (“analysis”), and the editorial. The report was prepared by Econtech, a firm that is heavily invested in the [...]
In yet another admission that WorkChoices is a failed policy, the head of the OEA, Peter McIlwain, has been demoteed. His organisation is being renamed the Workplace Authority, and its new director is Barbara Bennett. As Mark Bahnisch points out, this is part of a spin exercise. This is how the Minister explained the new [...]
You might have seen this Government advertisement (pdf) in the newspaper, or in some of the commentary since. I most recently saw it mentioned as the hook for a David Peetz column in The Courier-Mail. He points out the hypocrisy involved in encouraging small business to consider collective bargaining in order to “to be on [...]
The Australian Catholic Council for Employment Relations today published a scathing criticism of WorkChoices, saying it is biased towards bosses. Denis Peters’ AAP story is quite good — it mentions the long list of problems with WorkChoices, including “the minimum wage, minimum conditions and bargaining, unfair dismissals and the role of unions.” But Peters gets [...]
Alexander Downer has suggested Australian Labor should look to the Tony Blair’s industrial regime for inspiration. Downer says the British ex-PM …saw the modernisation of his national economy as the key to job creation, fairness and equality for all workers… [and] set a strong example for future Labour leaders, both in Britain and around the [...]
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