Listening to Australia Talks on Radio National and enjoying the IPA’s John Roskam going to head-to-head with the ACTU’s Sharan Burrow. Roskam has just told a sob story about how the government’s Fair Work Bill, at 600 pages, is far too complicated for small business owners to understand. But wasn’t WorkChoices over 700 pages long, plus a memorandum? Why wasn’t it too hard for small business owners to understand?

Must’ve been the mouse mats and novelty pens.

In this episode The Editor, John Surname, Ant Rogenous, Jeremy Sear and Craig discuss the following:

* The Liberal Party
* Four Corners
* Brenden Nelson
* Kevin Rudd
* WorkChoices
* Bank ads
* Right Wing Death Beasts
* Gun nuts

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This is exactly the kind of shit that the ALP’s style-over-substance preselection of celebrity candidates produces:

ALP federal candidate Nicole Cornes has stumbled on radio while trying to explain her party’s industrial relations policy.

[...]

Asked by ABC 891 morning announcer Matthew Abraham about Labor’s alternative to the Federal Government’s WorkChoices, Ms Cornes stumbled and went silent…

“AWAs allow for over $100,000…,” she said before inexplicably going silent.

Abraham was forced to ask “what do you mean, sorry?”

Ms Cornes tried to recover.

“AWAs take away penalty rates, WorkChoices…”

Abraham again had to ask “what do you mean by they allow for over $100,000?”

Ms Cornes said: “They don’t allow for people to negotiate over $100,000.”

But, finally, Abraham had to rescue her.

“Federal Labor believes workers earning under $100,000 per year should be protected in the workplace by a strong safety net,” Abraham said.

Ms Cornes agreed: “They should be.”

(source)

There goes a couple of hundred more swinging voters who were considering voting Labor — and who can blame them?

I am very disappointed at the news that the “Union thug” pro-WorkChoices commercials have been pulled because two of the thugs were convicted criminals. The Liberals (sorry, the BCA) must be very hard up for actors, because it seems like everyone who appears in these commericals is a criminal, or becomes one.

I found the idea of union thugs marching into dressmaking shops and turning off the power quite a hilarious idea, far exceeding the laughs in my own satire. If it wasn’t funny enough, they then added that “doomsday” music, darkened the colours, and claimed that Unions will tell people how to run their business if the reforms are scrapped.

Yeah, right.

That ad had more laughs than a single episode of The Wedge. The BCA should realise that if you’re going to do a scare campaign, you should do it properly. It shouldn’t leave it’s audience in stitches. I propose that for their next ad they get the Union thugs to chase the small business owners around Benny Hill style.

You can still download the ad from the BCA site – just click this link and save as.

No, don’t get out the champagne just yet. They only dropped the name WorkChoices. The laws remain.

You see, according to the Liberals, the Australian public aren’t smart enough to see through this kind of measure. This follows up John Howard’s assertion that he hopes the Australian people are playing a joke on him by still choosing Rudd in the polls. Again, he seems to think that the Australian public aren’t smart enough to see through Peter Costello’s smirking vote-buying, election year budget.

No, Mr. Howard, I assure you that the Australian people are not playing a joke. We fully intend to remove you in November.

Which brings me to this point: Is anyone else offended that John Howard thinks so little of the intelligence of the Australian public? Was he really that confident that we would favour him after the budget? Does he really think that by changing the name of terrible laws, they will suddnely be accepted by us with open arms?

PS. I found it funny that Joe Hockey admonished the Labor Party and the ACTU for running scares campaigns about WorkChoices. The Liberals would know all about scare campaigns now, wouldn’t they? I expect them to start in late September and peak right around early November.

I was delighted by Bill Heffernan’s comments last week on Julia Gillard. It was refreshing to hear a politician refusing to veil his deep-seated misogyny and archaic views with words like “family values”, “Christian ethics” and “decency”. More please. Say it like you see it, you old dinosaur.

I couldn’t agree more with Catherine Deveney’s comments about the need for more honesty in politics. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if politicians, and all those in public life, spoke their true mind rather than disguising true thoughts with weasel language?

Steve Fielding would justify every opinion by referring to the bible rather than the bullshit concept of “family.” Tony Abbott would do the same.

Julia Gillard would say that proposed Labor changes to WorkNoChoices are in response to union demands rather than pretending they’re not.

Steve Bracks would admit that he’s unwilling to tackle problem gambling in Victoria because his government is utterly reliant on the revenue rather than mumbling incoherently and ignoring the topic completely.

All politicians should look to those patriots at A Western Heart who lead the way in honesty. It’s just a simple tale of bitch meets pig:

Last night A Current Affair had the story of a stupid bitch who married a muslim pig, had a child with him, and then watched as said muslim pig kidnapped her daughter and stole her away.

Of course that begs the question of what the fuck is wrong with you women? Why the fuck are you still marrying these muslim savages and then wondering why they ‘change’ on you. Here’s a hint, you stupid molls – THEY DON”T CHANGE! That is how they really are and you are either too fucking blind to see through their bullshit act or you are too fucking stupid to understand what islam really is.

I propose legislation that any non-muslim woman converting and/or marrying a muslim should be stripped of her citizenship and deported to a muslim shithole of her owner’s…sorry…. her husband’s choice. That way there is no need to steal any children because they are already there.

Now that’s telling it like it is.

I’m not a member of a union. Hell, I don’t even have a job. But this morning I got up early, caught a train, walked along the Yarra with a takeaway coffee (so I could be easily identified as a member of the “latte left”), and took a seat at the MCG.

There is a widely-held belief in the community, summed up by MrLefty, that today’s anti-WorkChoices rallies around the country would achieve nothing. Being little more than expensive and high-profile union love-ins, the rally and march would change nobody’s opinion or vote and simply give John Howard more ammunition in the spin-laden promotion of his ideologically-driven industrial relations legislation. If this was true then I would agree that there was, as Lefty suggests, little point in attending the rally.

I held this view myself until a couple of weeks ago when I heard Greg Combet address a group of unionists. He told these blokey, Eureaka flag-toting building workers, in a stern and accusing tone, that ACTU research indicates a large proportion of union members around the country voted Liberal at the last election having been sucked in by John Howard’s bullshit interest rates scare campaign. Combet rightly made entire rows of the audience squirm by pointing out that those votes in all likelihood handed the balance of power, if not the election, to the Howard Government, and subsequently made possible the WorkChoices legislation. Hearing this I realised that the primary purpose of the ACTU Your Rights At Work campaign was not to convince the general public about the need to repeal WorkChoices by voting against the Liberals, but the membership of the country’s unions.

So this morning I toddled along to the MCG rally and afterwards marched to Federation Square. Sure, the overblown rhetoric of the union and Labor is just as reductionist and misleading as the Howard Government’s; sure, the lure of Jimmy Barnes was probably responsible for quite a few people showing up; sure, there were obscene quantities of meat pies and hot chips being consumed at 8 o’clock in the morning. But the fact remains that the WorkChoices legislation is intrinsically bad and the only way we’ll get rid of it is by voting against John Howard and the Liberal Party. If it takes a “rock concert” (as Howard called it) rally to change enough votes to make this happen then I’ll support it any way I can.

The High Court decision yesterday was a 5:2 majority call that the Federal government was well within its Constitutional corporations head of power in instituting its sweeping workplace relations laws.

The States have lost the battle and in doing so, they have lost the war, too. This court decision means that the Commonwealth ministers will be lining up for advice from the Australian Attorney General’s Department and the Australian Government Solicitor as to how far they can push their own portfolios via the corporations power.

When it happened in the Tasmanian Dams case under the Hawke government, I didn’t care – I was on their side. Damn straight the Tasmanian government should not be permitted to dam the Franklin, was my view. But now the shoe is on the other foot, so to speak, and I am all for federalism. What else have we got to protect us from the kind of sabotage of workplace relations and now potentially also of the health and education portfolios that this Howard government commits with such gleeful, smug abandon?

Read more about views of the High Court’s conservative ascendancy leading to the judgment here

Read about the case and find links to the judgment here

After being reported missing yesterday Kim Beazley has been sighted on the opinion pages of The Age. Accusing Amanda Vanstone of distracting attention from work visa issues by calling him a racist, Kim does the same, distracting attention from his being called a racist by focusing on work visa issues. Apparently it’s a race to the bottom in the brave new world of WorkChoices — and I can’t much argue with that.

So some ticks for Kim’s efforts to turn the debate around and have it on his terms, but some crosses for his continued oversimplification of the IR debate with lines such as this:

And in the end, this is not about xenophobia or rogue bosses — this is all about the Prime Minister’s wages race to the bottom. Labor will halt the race to the bottom by ripping up the mechanism that allows it — Australian Workplace Agreements.

And Kim even found the space in his article for an opportunistic plug for his pathetic and xenophobic values pledge policy:

But I am strongly of the view that workers who come to Australia should understand the Aussie work ethic, and a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

It’s one of the reasons I want these workers to sign up to these values when they come to Australia.

But most offensive is Kim’s ongoing pursuit of mediocrity, with his continued pitching of all policy to “middle Australia.” The article was bookended with claims that John Howard and WorkChoices are “delivering a one-two punch to middle Australia.” Can’t really argue with that, but I’d like to think that a Labor government would govern for all Australians, not just the middle, with a vision for greatness, not ordinariness.