Joe Hockey got the Workplace Relations WorkChoices Propaganda ministry gig because he was “avuncular”. I’m just stunned that no one has yet worked out that makes him “Uncle Joe”. There’d probably be a physical resemblance if Mr Hockey grew a moustache (why didn’t he participate in that charity grow a mo thing in November?). But, on his record to date, there are two (not necessarily mutually exclusive) alternatives about Uncle Joe’s thick grasp of his portfolio. He could be ignorant of the 1200 plus pages of the legislation and regs. Or he could be lying. Or, as I’m saying, both. Trevor Cormack at Solidarity totally nails the usual line – “but those bastard employers could have acted like that before WorkChoices – therefore WorkChoices is good” – about Tristar. (Isn’t there a single journo in the land who’d point out that before WorkChoices there was the Workplace Relations Act 1996 – introduced by the Howard government!)
WorkChoices specifically strengthens the position of companies like Tristar.
Three strikes, Joe.
Unfortunately, Uncle Joe won’t be walking away from the diamond because the media have decided that “WorkChoices isn’t a factor” and thus aren’t covering the everyday attacks on working people it facilitates and encourages (go along to one of the prominently advertised seminars for employers if you don’t believe me). It’s a crying shame. And it’s an offensive and insulting stunt for Uncle Joe to hold out hope to workers who’ve been dudded after working on the assembly line for thirty years that some spurious “investigation” will do anything to get them their rights. Because they don’t have those rights anymore.
I must beg to differ, Kim – he’s been Uncle Joe to me since stoushing began!
I’m liking that mo idea though.
The fundamentals of the legislation are quite straightforward, and if journalists have trouble understanding them, they can go to any number of labour law experts to fill them in. The fact they couldn’t be bothered, the fact that they think it is a third order issue, speaks volumes about their views on their role. It is not that they are too lazy to find out. It is not that they can’t read or understand the impact it is having, it is because fundamentally, in their view, these matters are things that happen to people who don’t count in the universe in which they operate.
This tells us a lot about the role that journalists now undertake, and it makes a mockery, if any more were needed, of their pose as ‘tribunes of the little people’. Nothing illustrates their fundamental elitism more, than their willingness to permit frank lies and endless obfuscation, when the subject under discussion, is the rights and entitlements of people who, in their scheme of things, simply don’t count.
Too true, Amused. But I shudder to think that the people who do count are Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith etc etc etc.
Tim Dunlop on where various wage indices are going – backwards:
http://blogs.news.com.au/news/blogocracy/index.php/news/comments/watching_wage_and_workchoices/
I suspect the problem with WorkChoices for journalists is that its impact is felt in so many different areas. Is it about unfair dismissals? Yes. Is it about removing minimum standards? Yes. Is it about transferring power from the states to the commonwealth? Yes. Does it remove that comfortable old standby ‘the award’? Again yes, but not immediately and in ways that will differ according to individual circumstances. And so on. Being so many different things in so many unrelated situations makes it hard to write nice concise lines about exactly what WorkChoices ‘is’ or ‘does’.
A Tristar a month should, however, keep up a general level of public awareness and resentment and Julia Gillard should be able to do something with the stats Mark mentioned. A link between WorkChoices and wages is a lot more plausible than the dodgy link the government tries to make with unemployment.
OT request.
Could someone investigate whether I’ve been inadvertently blacklisted by the spaminator? Or if advertently, let me know why?
Every comment I make gets stuck, and I assume someone keeps having to fish them out. Or maybe I don’t know wordpress as well as I pretend.
Thanks.
Following this theme of 1930s nostalgia, I note that Hockey’s given names are the same as those of Chifley.