Red Rag

• The new leader of the WA Nationals, Brendan Grylls, has called on the new leader of the Federal Nationals, Mark Vaile, to oppose Howard’s IR reforms: “We need to uphold our state’s rights and have our own IR system and we would be hoping that Mark Vaile as the new federal leader of the National Party would be using his first week in the job to make that point very clearly to the Prime Minister.”

• The Liberal Party federal council is opposed to the centralist plan, and Western Australian Liberal Senator David Johnson says he might be willing to cross the floor on industrial relations (tell him and his colleagues why they should do so). The Sydney Morning Herald suggests that “at a recent West Australian Liberal state council meeting there were suggestions MPs could lose preselection unless they opposed the centralisation measure.”

• The National Council of Churches, which represents Catholic, Anglican, Uniting and other churches, has expressed concerns about the IR push. Its general secretary said, “The value of each worker is not as a commodity, but as a person, a human being, loved by God. Our community has values that are more important than economics.”

• Anglican Bishop Philip Huggins told an ecumenical service, “If it’s not broken, don’t try to fix it.” He noted that John Howard likes to talk about low unemployment, strong wage growth, and low inflation, and concludes that “It is plainly, by his own criteria, a system that is working well.” There’s no need to undercut working conditions.

• A professor of theology at the Australian Catholic University, Neil Ormerod, wonders “how Kevin Andrews, Minister for Workplace Relations, reconciles his workplace reforms with his Catholic faith.” He also challenges Cardinal Pell: “it will also be interesting to see how a certain Catholic prelate, who has often sided with the Howard government, will respond to a policy so at variance with Catholic social teaching.” For his part, Pell said last October that we must “never treat workers as ‘resources’, but respect the Church’s view that persons are prior to resources.”

• Bob Carr has committed to maintaining the NSW industrial relations system for as many people as possible, because the corporations power does not give Howard constitutional authority to completely trample States’ rights.

• Join the growing chorus: attend a rally against the Howard Government’s attack on workers’ rights this Thursday, 30 June. 100 000 people are expected in Melbourne, 10 000 in Perth. Make sure your local rally pulls its weight.

While I’m plugging gigs, here’s one for those of us in Perth — a unique performance by Found: Quantity of Sheep.

In one of the largest collaborations between Perth’s independent film and music scenes, more than 100 local artists have worked to produce the “filmtrack” to the music of f:qs.

The films will be screened at the Luna Cinema in Leederville at 7pm on Thursday night, July 7, 2005.

Tickets for this once only event are available in advance from:

Planet Video
Luna Leederville
78 Records
Dadas

The screening will be followed by an afterparty at the Funk Club, upstairs from the Leederville hotel, featuring the likes of Schvendes, Radarmaker and the Stickfigures.

Check out the trailer, put it in your diary, and I’ll see you there.

There’s a pretty cool mp3 blog called melbs.org, which features bands local to the Melbourne area. If you’re not doing anything on Saturday, 2 July, and you’re in the vicinity, you should check out their official launch:

The star-spangling line-up for the launch: City City City, Colditz Glider, Tobias Cummings and Imogen play front and center. Bases loaded. Dee-jays follow.

- Saturday 2 July
- The Stage
- 2/231 smith st collingwood (or fitzroy for pedants — it’s on the west side of the street)
- a paltry eight bucks (all proceeds to artists)
- doors open whenever, I don’t know, 8pm? Come when you’re ready. Just come.

Sounds good. Someone go and have a beer for me.

Sam Ward, who regularly accuses me of Communism and other heinous offences against the free market, reports: “Hi Rob, just letting you know your website is banned in China.”

Workers in WA’s north-west are planning a massive stop-work meeting tomorrow, with about 4000 people expected to attend. They’re considering a 24-hour protest strike to kick off a long campaign. Interestingly, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry also sees it as a long-term campaign, and thinks workers should consider prolonged strike action in future: “Any significant strike action would be counterproductive and an over-reaction at this stage.” Update: 24-hour strike on Tuesday.

Sunili is currently in Sri Lanka to research her honours project on women and development, and to visit her family. She’s written a brilliant post about what she’s encountered in a society devastated by the tsunami:

The first thing I feared when I heard about the tsunami while I was at a Boxing Day Pool party last year was the safety of my mother, who was there visiting my grandmother who lives right by the coast (all my family was safe). The next thing I realised was that the poorest of the poor living in those shacks by the beach would have been the worst hit. It was often the people who had nothing who lost everything.

We saw it all on the news in December and January, but nothing prepared me for what I saw driving down south this week. There must be many words I could use to describe it – carnage, devastation, destruction, annihilation, demolition, obliteration, ruin – but I feel they can not do justice to the vision before my eyes. How can you even start to describe what has happened to people’s lives here? And these are the ones that still have lives.

Go read it.

The WA Government has announced it will run a $220 000 advertising campaign (Less pay. No way!) against Howard’s industrial relations reforms. Premier Geoff Gallop says:

Our State labour relations system has provided fairness and protection for employees for 100 years and at the same time WA consistently leads the nation with respect to economic performance and low unemployment. This is why it is imperative that we fight the Howard Government’s plan to reduce wages, conditions and job security for working Western Australians.

Kevin Andrews attacked the campaign, suggesting “the money would be better spent on the social security system, employment programs and helping poor people.”

What hypocrisy! The cost of Gallop’s campaign is just one percent of the $20 million blitz that the Federal Government is about to launch.

Of course, that doesn’t include a brochure that will be sent out to millions of households, paid for by public money out of Coalition MPs’ communications allowance (The Australian, p6). This is more hypocrisy; Andrews told Parliament a smaller mailout opposing attacks on workers turned the MPs’ allowance into “a junk mail delivery service”.

If Andrews thinks $220 000 would be better spent on welfare and employment services, then what is he waiting for? He’s got over $20 million dollars to reallocate.

Update: The West Australian (p6) complains that the public will pay for Gallop’s ads, but doesn’t mention the Howard/Andrews campaign — or the fact that it will cost 100 times more. And as Frank Calabrese points out, the paper is guilty of “accepting payment to run those same ads they say are propoganda.”

A guest post by former blogger Paul Watson. He sent it to me early Friday morning, but I was in transit all day so didn’t get a chance to post it until now.

A segment on Wednesday’s SBS Dateline program seems to have so far escaped the attentions of both mainstream media and the blog-world, despite it being the biggest news story of the year, IMO.

Curiously, the next day’s Age has a story that touches on an aspect of the matters discussed in the SBS program, while adding nothing new. But surely the Age should have re-written the story at 9 pm Wednesday night, to incorporate the goldmine of additional information that the Dateline segment offered (if you doubt me, read the transcript and compare).

An explanation here could be laziness on the Age’s part — either in it being too close to deadline to be bothered (although not physically impossible: 9/11 happened at 10.46 pm AEST, and was all over the next morning’s papers) and/or in not having a preview tape, or at the very least prior notice of the nature of the SBS program’s content.

More likely, though, is that the Age was simply afraid to do a proper story on the matter. That is, it knew that the SBS program was going to have some explosive and important content, and decided therefore to stay well away from it. Its story manqué on the same matter was therefore a coincidence, and nothing more.

Less charitable still is the possibility that the diluted, rather inconsequential story that did run in the next day’s Age was deliberately held over to act as a decoy to, and media mute-button on the SBS program. While such an act defies ordinary journalistic explanation, it is all rather naked, if scarily so, when seen as a gesture of Big Media sycophancy to Big Government.

To pinpoint the Age’s journalistic omissions, or worse, compare the opinions of Dr David Neal, from the Victorian Bar Society (hey, that’s a local phone call, the Age!) as quoted on SBS, to those of ACT Law Society executive director Larry King, quoted in the Age.

Plainly, they both can’t be right — and David Neal was speaking obiter dicta, as it were — yet for the Age to report the ACT Law Society’s (predictable) compliance in the matter as if it were an authoritative and uncontroversial ruling is plain callow.

That is mostly all I have to say. Read the transcript for yourselves, and of course, watch out for the program’s repeat, if there’s going to be one.

Finally, although I don’t think that it really matters for my argument, I pre-emptively note that I am on the record for saying that Andrew Wilkie is a boomer tool. I still hold this opinion, BTW. In case it’s not clear why, look at Wilkie’s main bee-in-bonnet: the lies told about WMDs in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Well, derr!

The Iraq War’s fall-out is no longer about WMDs, nor breathless revelations about their non-existence from the likes of Andrew Wilkie. Nor is it now about the promise of cheap oil (hah!). Indeed, the very point is that Iraq started as, and remains a non-traditional war – one bereft of secrets (and so consequently of meaningful “intelligence” and “lies” also).

That the West has long been losing the Iraq War is an open secret. Ironically, as Wednesday’s Dateline showed, the forces of government suppression have moved on from the merely futile — “scapegoating” more-than-willing fall-guy Andrew Wilkie — to the dangerously futile: scapegoating anyone, however large or small, who dares mouth the open secret. History shows that being on the losing side of a protracted war is invariably when domestic scapegoating — far away from the front — reaches fever pitch.

And if Thursday’s (23/6) Age is any guide, don’t look to the mainstream Western media for leadership on this one. The media’s game is also transparent, if rarely uttered aloud: by watching the losing West lash out (both domestically and in Iraq) — and standing by and saying nothing — one becomes a “winner”.

Further reading

Paul Kalina, Truth falls, The Age, 16 June 2005. A preview by a TV reporter of an otherwise ho-hum companion documentary, broadcast 23/6, to the SBS Dateline segment.

Deborah Snow, Big Brother sends in the hit squads to clean up national security threat, SMH, 18 September 2004. The sole contemporaneous mainstream media account of the 74 computer “cleansing�? raids in September 2004. Lack of subsequent/broader media attention can be attributed to the fact, made clear on the recent SBS segment, that mere reportage, by anyone, of the fact of the raids can constitute a (jailable) threat to national security.

Wake up at 6:50am. Realise I have slept through my alarm and the taxi I’d booked is long gone. Plane left ten minutes ago. Call a taxi, freshen up, gather my things, get to the airport at 7:15am.

Look at the departures board to see what my options are; notice that my plane hasn’t gone yet — delayed due to fog in Melbourne. Will miss my connection, but there’s a seat on the 11:50 to Perth. Manage to have my luggage put on board, arrive at the gate just in time for the final boarding call.

Arrive in Melbourne with a couple of hours to kill. Have a bite to eat, read the papers (Canberra Times, The Age, SMH), flip through a picture book (Herald Sun), solve a couple of Sudoku puzzles. Time to go, but no boarding call.

Announcement that they’re waiting for an engineer, fifteen minute delay. Twenty minutes later, announcement that they’re waiting for approval from Sydney, an hour delay. Finally on board: captain explains that some gravel scratched a wing, needed approval from the regulator in Sydney and Boeing in America before take-off.

Flight is pretty good. On an exit row, so there’s plenty of leg room, and there’s only two of us in the row of three seats. Food’s okay, and I get some sleep. Arrive in Perth behind schedule, but no big deal. Wander down to the luggage carousel, find a good spot to watch the bags. An announcement: “Would the following passengers please make their way to the Baggage Services counter.” My name.

My suitcase is in Sydney.

The Canberra Times’s Ian Sharpe knows what the Coalition means by “choice”.

The Senate is currently saying goodbye to those who will not return for the next sitting. In general, these speeches plod along — they’re touching, but when you hear them one after the other it gets a bit repetitive.

Occasionally, though, someone breaks the mould. Senator Geoff Buckland gave a terrific speech last night:

Senator BUCKLAND — Senator Harris came in on the back of the Pauline Hanson phenomenon and, as I recall, by default. Hopefully the evils of Hansonism have gone forever. But I would just say that I wish Len well for the future. Senator Lees suffered the outcome of an electoral war largely of her own making. Let history be the judge. I wish her well with her book. Senator Cherry, as we know, has a life after the Senate. I want to wish him well in the next stage of his life. I have a feeling he will be knocking on the doors of politicians for some time to come.

Senator Crossin — You might be one of his constitutents!

Senator BUCKLAND — No, I will not be, Senator Crossin — I can assure you that I have some principles! I say that with deference to you, Acting Deputy President Cherry.

If everyone got up and told us what they really thought, these speeches would be far more interesting.

Over the weekend, the ACTU launched its advertising campaign against the Government’s industrial relations package. They’re good ads, I think — better than any recent ALP election campaign ad.

Yesterday the IR minister, Kevin Andrews, wouldn’t guarantee that nobody would be treated in the manner depicted in the ads. Blog readers would know why he couldn’t make that guarantee — Manas and I pointed out that Andrews’s own department was already trying to force people onto AWAs that undercut their pay and conditions.

Today’s Australian outlines the dispute:

The man in charge of John Howard’s workplace reform agenda is facing a revolt from his own department, with staff claiming they were coerced into signing non-union individual employment contracts.

[...]

For the past nine months, Mr Andrews’s department has been locked in a battle with half its 3000 staff, who are holding out against the Government’s preferred course that they sign AWAs.

In Mr Andrews’s Department of Employment and Workplace Relations it is official policy that all new staff are only employed on AWAs.

But the department recently told 15 employees in Melbourne that if they wanted to continue working, they would need to sign AWAs.

The staff were even provided with forms that already had the yes box ticked to the question: “I acknowledge my commitment to sign an Australian Workplace Agreement.”

Stephen Smith agrees that DEWR is a model employer, and this dispute “shows what life will be like under the Howard Government’s proposed changes — people won’t have choice, they’ll be forced onto individual contracts unfairly.”

Manas thinks Andrews has inadvertently revealed a truth he would rather hide:

This morning on ABC Radio, Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews said, with some exasperation, of the ongoing dispute with DEWR staff and the CPSU:

This is just a normal dispute which has been beaten up by the union because it’s convenient to do so in the current climate.

That’s the whole point, Minister Andrews. This is just a normal dispute. Every day, in your average kind of disputes, workers across the country are forced onto individual contracts, often with lesser conditions than those to which they would otherwise be entitled, thanks to your government’s IR legislation.

It will only get worse.

Seventeen academics have written twelve papers criticising the Howard Government’s industrial relations agenda. Their report card (pdf) concludes:

On the basis of our considered analysis, the proposed changes will do nothing to address labour and skills shortages or the productivity slowdown. They will, however, damage the fabric of Australian society by encouraging poorly-paid jobs with irregular hours and little security, worsening work-family balance. The focus of Federal Government policy is to give employers power over employees instead of promoting innovative solutions based on workplace partnerships.

The group’s convenor, Professor Russell Lansbury of the University of Sydney Business School, explained that the term “flexibility” being bandied around by the Government is misleading.

NICK GRIMM: But what about creating a more flexible job market?

RUSSELL LANSBURY: Well, flexibility is good, but what we see in this legislation is that it’s flexibility for the employer, not flexibility for both sides, and we feel that to gain the support of workers, it needs to be a two sided process.

I haven’t read the papers yet, so I can’t comment on their content, but I will point out that they’re available for download.

Coming soon to eBay: the ice-pick that killed Leon Trotsky.

Dennis Shanahan is up to his old tricks, spinning every Newspoll against Labor. In an article entitled Beazley bombs with the voters, we learn that Labor’s primary vote is holding up while the Coalition’s has fallen:

According to the latest Newspoll survey, conducted exclusively for The Australian on the weekend, the Coalition’s primary vote fell three points from 47 per cent, a post-election high, to 44 per cent.

Labor’s primary vote remained unchanged on 37per cent. Based on preferences at the last election, the two-party-preferred vote for the Coalition fell from 53 to 51 per cent and Labor’s rose from 47 to 49per cent.

I’m not going to pretend that Beazley has performed well in the last couple of months, but if he’s “bombed” it hasn’t affected people’s voting intentions. If he gets his act together, Labor should be able to strike out in front while the Coalition tries to sell its most contentious policies (including Senate reform) in the next few months.