Australia should be a mosaic or 20 or so medium sized workable cities of 800,000 to 1,200,000 people with 5 or so larger centres. Instead we have marginally workable 4 monolithic cities which are now increasing required to raid resources (water, energy) from surrounding communities to stay viable. Add to that the consequences of the last 14 years of low interest rates with no lending restraints seen in the form of runaway real estate prices. The end result is mass commercial enslavement of those who are able to “hook into” property ownership, isolation of those people with low incomes, and a steady consolidation of overall wealth in the hands of an ever smaller group of situationally lucky people.

With house prices of $500,000 to 1,000,000 being now common the plight of people on incomes of $18 per hour is truly bleak. How can they ever hope to fit into the Australian life cycle. They are stalled at the beginning.
And the natural economic forces which should have incomes increase to over come the imbalance have been distorted in their effect.

So here we have the field of forces laid out. In one corner we have a bunch of smuggly wealthy propery owners. In another corner we have a bunch of people keen to join the first bunch. In a third corner we have a bunch of business people who know that hey will have to foot the bill if bunch “b” is to join bunch “a”. In the forth corner is a gateway to “goodies”, which has appeal to all parties. By increasing the divide between bunch “a” and bunch “b”, bunch “c” has become vulnerable to the universal appeal of goodies gateway “d”. How this system resolves itself will most likely be influenced more by circumstance than by constraint. It is entirely possible that environmental forces will overide all prior interests, and rearrange all needs. A kind of system reset, much as global war tends to do.

The IR changes are an attempt to suppress the natural balancing process. But as we are all intuitively aware, the greater the forces in a system the more unstable it becomes.

There is an ever present need to keep our working relationships relevent to our environment. Howards IR changes are a necessary consequence of an ever changing world. I would, however, prefer to see them implemented with an “equal human” flavour rather than a “master and slave” flavour. This is what Rudd is about.

And a change of leader and the flow on of a reshuffle will result in jobs being spilled in some places, with some people and being picked up elsewhere.

Similarly, Emerson’s announcement sensibly suggests legislative tests for the genuineness of contractor status (reflecting tests used by the ATO which are derived from interpretations of common law) and also protections against sham contracting.

I’m wondering if there is some confusion here – and probably a bit deliberately by all parties involved. There are “contractors” of which “independent contractors” are a sub-set. The test must be for independence.

A couple of years ago, before the big IR changes, about 30% of employment agreements were common law contracts. At that time about 2.5% were AWAs. That proportion won’t have stayed the same as the number of AWA’s have grown.

I’m currently employed under a common law contract, but wouldn’t consider myself to be a “contractor” in any other aspect of my employment relationship. But there’s alot of us out there.

The core of the labour hire industry strategy has been to misrepresent its aims, with power buried in trivial-seeming clauses or non-legislative administrative procedures.

Emerson is basically calling their bluff. He’s saying there won’t be many changes, except we’ll just have a good test for sham contracting arrangements and a formal definition of contractor. Labour hire lobbyists fought bitterly to ensure there were no definitions of contractor, because the lack makes any court challenges extremely expensive.

Now, the absense of these in the Independent Contractors Act happen to be the two key areas that let the labour hire firms control contractors, and effectively work against genuine contracting. Howard knows this. Hockey does too. I don’t know whether Kevin Andrews gets it or not.

The labour hire industry and Howard can’t condemn this approach without admitting their own duplicity.

Some might point to the provisions against sham contracting in the Act, but those provisions are actually another illustration of duplicity, for they’re effectively useless as implemented in the Act.

I would think the labour hire lobbyists and Howard would be squirming at this stage.

It’s been noted elsewhere that the adverts run in the major nationals over the Christmas break, seeking advisors and other staff for the new ALP leader and front bench, stated that the conditions for some senior positions would be covered by AWAs.

True. But I don’t think that Rudd has any choice because he is technically not the employer.

When will the ALP learn that holding fire on policy just makes them look as opportunist as Howard.

Holding fire on policy also means that the policy is not reported on in terms of what’s in the policy, and not commented on by journalists with expertise in that policy area. It means that the policy, when eventually released during the election campaign, gets hacked and stretched into the procrustean bed of the “game frame” within which the media reports elections, and gets reported on by political reporters who often aren’t intellectually equipped to understand the policy or to interpret it to the public. Latham’s Tasmanian forestry policy announcement is a case in point. Had the policy been announced two months (or more) before the last election, its political effects would have been far more positive for Labor.

Parenthetically, in more than a decade of watching such things I can’t recall seeing so many senior positions advertised at once – not even after an election. If it indicates that the ALP is seriously looking for new advice and ideas, then there might be some hope after all …

Excuse me, the election is this year, losers.

This is Beazleyite timidity at its worst, parading as “strategy”. Who will rid us of this troublesome orthodoxy that the ’small target’ politics works?

Now that the former IR system has been well and truly scrambled, in practical terms there are going to have to be compromises (with the mining industry for instance) that tend to devalue the strength of a blanket commitment to throw the laws out.

Similarly with independent contractors. Howard’s IC legislation was basically designed to legitimise getting people off payroll and passing the costs of workers comp, holiday pay, sick pay, super etc onto individual workers, maintaining the fiction that they were fierce independent entrepreneurial types even though an individual employer has effective control of their day-to-day activities.

But there are a sizeable element of the workforce (IT professionals for instance) who have traditionally worked these arrangements and to who changes would be seen as a threat.

So yes, in using the broad language of fairness Rudd’s just tapping into the zeitgeist and positioning himself to use Howard’s own mantra – ‘I don’t think we need to go too deeply into specifics, people know what I stand for’ – against him.

‘ …And police unions…too often turn into a political force that encourages stonewalling by incumbent governments, in the process destroying public trust. In South Australia, the states Attorney-general and Police Commissioner have knocked back requests for an independent anti-corruption body after allegations surfaced that cops were protecting drug dealers. Even in Queensland where the Fitzgerald Royal commission set the gold-standard for police corruption investigations, the Beattie government’s see-no-evil attitude towards the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee on Palm Island leaves the impression that the police association in that state is too strong by half.
By its very nature, police work requires a zero-tolerance attitude towards corruption within its ranks. If law enforcement is seen by the public as compromised, it loses its ability to do its job.’ – EXTRACT FROM

The Australian’s editorial – Tuesday, January 9, 2007

I think most Aussies respect Saint Kevins halo and grasp of fine detail and feel that he is generally across most pertinent issues.
The only ones he’s stumbled so far as I can see are his overbroad definition of socialism, ( lumping in healthy democratic and libertarian strands with the toxic waste that is Marxism) Then his silence of the lambs on the key question of the sacking-without-notice of at least two democratically elected xtian-socialist governments in this country and finally this knarly one above…these ugly police union gorillas in our midst.