Red Rag

Mark Latham’s ten reasons to stay out of party politics are well-padded. First, he complains (rightly) about our hollow democracy:

No. 1: Public apathy. Public apathy has hollowed out our democracy and handed power to a small clique of party machine men. In the Labor Party, for example, active party membership (as opposed to ethnic branch stacking) has collapsed.

No. 4: Rise of machine politics. As Labor’s real membership declined, it was relatively easy for a handful of factional power-brokers to grab hold of the party in the 1980s. A few dozen party officials and faction bosses now effectively control the organisation.

Next, he wishes people would play the ball, not the man — though evidently this doesn’t apply to people who publish their (so-called) diaries:

No. 2: Loss of privacy. Politics is now regarded as just another form of entertainment, ripe for ridicule and prying into politicians’ private lives.

No. 5: Politics of personal destruction (Labor-style).
No. 6: Politics of personal destruction (Liberal-style).

And then he gives his proposed alternative course of action a dot-point of its own:

No. 9: Social problems require social solutions.

No. 10: The sane, rational choice. If you are a young, idealistic person, don’t get involved in organised politics. Contribute to your community, your neighbourhood, your immediate circle of trust and support.

All up, Latham’s really given (at most) six reasons — but his conclusion that people should stay out of organised politics doesn’t follow. I’ve argued before that everyone who cares about Australian society should join a political party (Labor, Liberal, Greens, whatever) because that’s the only way to improve our democracy. As Andrew Norton pointed out about Latham’s prescription:

Far from advocating a political revolution, the practical consequence of his advice to stay out of national politics and get involved locally is to leave the ‘ruling class’ in power, unchallenged.

There ought to be no distinction between involvement in a political party and involvement in the community. In the era of mass political membership in Australia, political parties of all shapes and sizes were built on engagement with local communities — holding public meetings and picnic days, passing the hat around for people in need (as the Labor Party did to get Latham through university), forming real links between politicians and their local communities.

Mark Latham wants us to turn our back on that tradition, and instead to hand political parties to the machine men he so despises.

Well, time’s up. It must have been harder than I thought to guess the songs — I was sure someone would get at least eight of them. But the winner is a fellow Perth blogger, Paul, who scored six right.

1. Dresden Dolls — Girl Anachronism
2. Pearl Jam — Alive
3. Ben Folds Five — Steven’s Last Night in Town
4. Frente — Labour of Love
5. The Who — Baba O’Riley
6. You Am I — Soldiers
7. Jane’s Addiction — Jane Says
8. Billy Bragg — The Internationale
9. Glenn Miller & his Orchestra — Sing, Sing, Sing
10. Europe — The Final Countdown

The only two songs that nobody got were The Internationale (my NSW comrades should be ashamed, though they were the only ones to pick Baba O’Riley) and Sing, Sing, Sing, which everyone should know. Everyone.

Now to think of a prize…

• Despite repeated assurances that the IR legislation was being prepared according to schedule, John Howard has cancelled a sitting week of the House of Representatives because Kevin Andrews and his team of seconded lawyers couldn’t get the job done. This is despite recent calls from the National Party for the detail of the proposals to be revealed sooner rather than later.

• Prominent Jesuit lawyer Frank Brennan has defended the right of clergy to enter political debates, saying “[i]t is far too cavalier for government or their supporters to dismiss church leaders” when they disagree with government policy.

• Certainly the Government will have trouble dismissing Cardinal George Pell, a close ally of John Howard and Tony Abbott, who thinks there ought to be “a modest strengthening” of unions’ role in society: “I think we need strong and effective and humane and altruistic unions to continue to dialogue with these people. I am certainly not supportive of a radical rethink of the unions. I think that’s gone far enough, you might even argue it’s gone a bit too far.”

• Kevin Andrews says the Government will attempt to squash the minimum wage claim when the Industrial Relations Commission holds a directions hearing. If it does so, the ACTU will take its case to the State commissions.

• Last time John Howard turned his attention to the skills crisis, he fiddled the figures so that burger-flippers were counted as apprentices. This time Howard wants to bring apprenticeships under his low pay commission, so they will be paid “at levels that ensure they are competitive in the labour market” — in other words, their wages will be slashed. Stephen Smith says this is “a long standing policy obsession”, and remembers John Howard’s 1992 call for a youth wage of just $3/hour.

• The Police Federation of Australia is concerned that the Howard Government’s industrial relations plan “will have a significant adverse impact on the [police] force nation-wide.” Its national conference will discuss the issue, and is particularly concerned about the inclusion of productivity targets if officers are forced onto AWAs. Sergeant Burgess says the community would not like officers “to be judged on the number of infringement notices they issue or the number of people they arrest”.

Jason Soon informs us that one of Drew Fraser’s racist mates has made his article available online. I challenge you to read the article and explain how it belongs in a law review. Even before the research and argument are considered, surely it should meet the threshold test of being in some way related to the law?

Law Review editor James McConvill told The Australian that “it was quite a well-considered piece, it wasn’t overly rhetorical. Before people could judge, they should actually read the article.” Now that we are in a position to do so, it’s blindingly obvious that McConvill read a different article. Take Fraser’s interesting conclusion, for instance:

[W]hite Australians now face a life-or-death struggle to preserve their homeland. … one of the major parties, indeed, not one member of the Commonwealth Parliament, offers citizens the option of voting to defend and nurture Australia’s Anglo-European identity. The problem, in short, is clear: The Australian nation is bereft of a responsible ruling class. The solution is, in principle, no less obvious: namely, the restoration of a ruling class rooted in the reinvigorated folkways of an authentically Anglo-American civic patriotism, a ruling class re-attached to the history and destiny of its own people. Only time will tell whether and how any such constitutional reformation could take place. … It may well be that only a miracle can save us now; all the more reason, then, to recall that God helps only those who help themselves. The capacity to act remains the key to our political salvation.

This is nothing short of a call for “white revolution”, especially when read in the context of his remark elsewhere that “only open and violent resistance to the Third World invasion” will save us from “the masses of non-white aliens crowding into our cities”.

But what of the research that allegedly underpins this tripe? There are four references to the Occidental Quarterly, which is described by the Southern Poverty Law Centre as “an academic-looking journal filled with articles by white-supremacist luminaries”. Interestingly, one of the articles referred to is Fraser’s own: he complains that Australia has been “[s]wamped by ‘the rising tide of color’ washing in from every overcrowded corner of the Third World” and predicts that “[i]n the end, a Patriot King may have to save us.”

Other Occidental Quarterly articles cited are worth a mention. For instance, Fraser refers to a book review by the late Sam Francis, who was sacked from the Washington Times for speaking to a pro-eugenicist organisation, and who “was in recent years and until his death the chief editor for the Council of Conservative Citizens, a leading white supremacist hate group.” Then there’s an article in which Louis R Browning claims that “the Jewish extended phenotype [which he characterises as a ‘disease’] has been waging war on the Western biocultural organism”, including through “the Jewish development of Marxism”. Fraser also likes an article on Jewish culture by Kevin MacDonald, who supports David Irving and “who claims that Jews were evolved to be left-wing multiculturalists as part of a ‘divide and conquer’ survival strategy”. To use the words of the article Fraser cites,

[O]nce Europeans are convinced [by the Jews] of their own moral depravity, they will destroy their own people in a fit of altruistic punishment. The general dismantling of the culture of the West, and eventually its demise as anything resembling an ethnic entity, will occur as a result of a moral onslaught triggering a paroxysm of altruistic punishment.

How can anyone doubt the academic credibility of this stuff?

But it doesn’t stop with Occidental Quarterly. There’s Frank Salter, a founding member of National Action, a pro-apartheid terrorist group that, for instance, carried out a shotgun attack on the Australian representative of the African National Congress. There’s Steve Sailer, a journalist with no scientific qualifications, who argues (among other things) that the body fat levels of different races explain interracial marriage, and that homosexuality might be caused by an infectious disease that spreads like the flu. There’s a reference, too, to a “prescient” 1920 book by Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color, which warned that “the world will drift into a gigantic race-war”, and that “migrations of lower human types … must be rigorously curtailed.”

Jean-Phillippe Rushton’s Race, Evolution and Behaviour also rates a mention, as Ken Parish predicted it would. SPLC writes:

Although his training is unrelated to biology or genetics, Rushton has not hesitated to spread his opinions far and wide, especially through his major published work, Race, Evolution and Behavior. The book makes such claims as an inverse relationship between penis and brain size (blacks are supposedly more promiscuous and less intelligent than whites). … In recent years, Rushton has spoken on eugenics several times at conferences of the racist American Renaissance magazine, in which he has also published a number of articles. In 2002, after renting several academic mailing lists, Rushton mailed an abridged version of Race, Evolution and Behavior to 40,000 people — a mailing paid for by the [pro-eugenics] Pioneer Fund.

Fraser cites a publication by the New Century Foundation, a hate group whose leader has a “clear conception of the United States as a nation ruled by and for whites”. The pamphlet in question is a notorious attempt to fiddle crime statistics to show that black people are dangerous thugs, but it’s wrong:

[Jared] Taylor uses an incredibly simplistic analytical method that flatly ignores the fundamental conclusion of decades of serious criminology: Crime is intimately related to poverty. In fact, when multivariate statistical methods such as regression analysis are used, study after study has shown that race has little, if any, predictive power.

And that is not the only “error” Taylor makes. How on earth did this pass the referees unchallenged? We are not talking about some obscure statistical work; this is a famous piece of racist propaganda that has been thoroughly and publically debunked.

Is Drew Fraser’s article a genuine academic endeavour? I don’t think so. The more I look at it, the more obvious it is that this is mere racist polemic.

Deakin University has rejected Andrew Fraser’s article, which was to be published in the Deakin Law Review. In my earlier post on this issue, I said that academic publications should be free to discuss controversial topics, but that if they abandon their academic rigour in favour of controversy and headline-grabbing, they should be held to account.

There is little doubt that academic articles are protected under the relevant legislation — as long as they are published “reasonably and in good faith”. I’m not convinced that the process in this case was in good faith. Two referees rejected Fraser’s article, so the editors went looking for two more that would be more flexible with their standards. Every time James McConvill posts about the process, someone criticises it and his post mysteriously disappears. As someone who claims to be a staunch defender of free speech, who says the university should have stood up to the critics, you’ve got to wonder what McConvill is hiding.

But the University should not have “bowed to legal threats”. Sally Walker should have cancelled the publication because of doubts about the integrity of the refereeing process. If she stood by the academic integrity of the Deakin Law Review’s editors, she should have allowed publication and fought the court case. If there is a risk of “chilling” open academic discussion, it is made much worse when the university administration will not defend its staff. The court would have heard evidence about the refereeing process, and would have made its decision based on whether it was a genuine academic publication.

Note: Drew Fraser has been busy soliciting Stormfront members for support. He is not a disinterested academic, he is a racist who advocates race riots. He uses his university title to provide a rationalisation for racist violence.

Update: Liam points out that McConvill also deletes comments from his blog. This from a man who complained that academics too often “close ourselves off” from the public.

Will Pandagate never die?

Subject: hello there
From: Diana R[…]
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 12:49:31 -0500
To: Robert Corr

Greetings and salutations Robert Corr

I was idly cruising the net and decided to put in my various names to see what came up. I tried my present married name, my previous married name and my maiden name. Surprise, surprise. A whole PAGE of Diana Elgars - not related to me apparently - all to do with Ms Fits aka Marieke Hardy aka Diana Elgar. I find it most disturbing that an extremely unusual surname coupled with Diana (the less common Aussie form of Diane) be a rampaging rhino on the WWW. Did this little Ms Fits steal my name from me? How old is this wretch? Did I go to school with her and piss her off royally somehow and did she in an astounding act of retribution decide to make my name mud? I was very well known as a writer at school. I’m sure there are dozens of people out there saying, “Yeah, I went to school with her!! Wow, didn’t she turn into a foul-mouthed harlot?”

Most disturbing indeed.

Most cordially yours,

Diana (ex Elgar).

• The Government’s CFMEU-busting body will be headed by John Lloyd, a Liberal stooge who played a leading role in the attacks of the Kennett (Vic) and Court (WA) Liberal governments on workers’ rights. In his first media conference after taking the job, he did not rule out using the ABCC’s powers in a Gestapo type way:

  JOURNALIST: Mr Lloyd, the unionists have been very critical of these moves and have suggested that these new powers will be used in a Gestapo like way. What’s your response to that?

  JOHN LLOYD: Well, if they are used in the Gestapo type way, the commission will, as I say, use whatever powers it has available to it to respond to the cases which it is investigating in which it feels appropriate to institute proceedings.

• While Kevin Andrews has successfully bullied the Archdiocese of Melbourne into submission, the Australian Catholic Commission for Employment Relations is not so easily pushed around. In a briefing paper for Catholic bishops, ACCER said it has “particular problems with the introduction of a minimum wage based on the requirements of a single adult employee without family responsibilities; the abolition of unfair dismissal rights in businesses of less than 100 employees; and changes to the no-disadvantage test that is applied to collective and individual agreements.”

• The IMF supports the Government’s IR plans, because it understands what their real goal is: cutting wages. The IMF complains that “minimum wages are relatively high at almost 60 percent of median earnings of full-time male employees”, and notes that abolishing the no-disadvantage test and establishing a low pay commission will undermine the current egalitarian system. (Update: See Ross Gittins.)

• Although their advertisements are no longer on television, unions have continued a grass-roots campaign to inform the community about the Government’s plans. And it’s not just preaching to the converted: “I’m a pretty conservative sort of bloke, raced three kids, average family, um and yet this particular issue has made me come and attend this type of union meeting for the first time in my life.”

• Although Telstra would have contributed to Howard’s recent popularity fall, it is industrial relations that is changing votes: “For consumers, or the Australian community in general, the government’s proposed workplace changes were considered negative pretty much every way you looked at it.”

• After selling out his constituents on the sale of Telstra, Mark Vaile is desperately trying to convince his fellow National MPs to tow the Liberal line on industrial relations. He wants to see the detail as soon as possible (don’t we all!), and says he will “concentrate on passing the workplace relations legislation, which the Nationals unanimously support.” That unanimity must be news to Barnaby Joyce, who is still threatening to cross the floor on IR, especially over the removal of unfair dismissal protections.

• The Office for the Employment Advocate, which is responsible for monitoring AWAs, assessed contracts against the wrong award. As a result, employees were underpaid by thousands of dollars. The incompetent, anti-worker OEA will have an increased role in the new industrial relations system.

• The Government has been testing its advertising campaign on focus groups — who apparently don’t like what they’ve seen: “secret focus groups used to trial [the] $20 million advertising campaign on workplace reforms have been left confused and concerned about the changes.” Participants thought the main ad was “light on detail and distant from people’s lives”, and they were “concerned” that one of the ads “implied that if a worker left an award he or she could not return to it.” It can’t avoid that implication, because it’s true — but this demonstrates that people can see through the Government’s weasel words. The Australian reports that the ads are “very political.” Meanwhile, the High Court is yet to decide whether the advertising outlays are constitutionally valid.

Update:

• The ACTU will put the Government on the back foot by launching a minimum wage claim in the Industrial Relations Commission this week. The Government will be forced either to undercut the union claim, or attempt to stop the process — thereby ensuring an 18 month wage freeze for Australia’s lowest-paid workers. The case will highlight John Howard’s record: he has argued for real wage cuts in four of the last nine years, and workers would be $50/week worse off if the AIRC had listened to the Prime Minister. The Australian’s Brad Norington writes, “The ACTU is not just thwarting the Government, it is laying down a serious challenge.”

Tama Leaver points to a powerful video clip: George Bush Don’t Like Black People.

A while ago I signed up for news about WordPress.com. That was before it launched, and even before the public was told what it was going to be. It turns out that WordPress.com is a hosted blogging service. It’s a bit like the WordPress version of Movable Type’s TypePad — but it’s free.

Anyway, the point of this post is that I received an “invite” (they should be “invitations,” not “invites,” but whaatever) and I’ve set up a blog to give it a test run. Here are my initial thoughts:

• The installation was dead easy. Pick a username and title, enter your email address. Done.

• Nice new colour scheme — bolder, more teal than grey. The dashboard looks a lot cleaner, and it’s far more welcoming than Wordpress. That’s important if it’s going to compete with Blogger.

• The default theme is Kubrick, and there’s a nifty menu to choose one of 8 themes. Unfortunately, there’s no scope to customise them in any meaningful way. Hopefully that will change in the near future.

• It includes 25MB of space for file uploads, including images, movies and MP3s (with a cap of 1.5MB per file). It’s a good idea — 25MB is enough for many people, and paid plans to expand that storage would give the service a viable income stream. Of course, you can use sites like Flickr to host your pictures, too.

• The interface is based on WordPress 1.6, which is still in alpha — but this version is very polished. The WYSIWYG editor produces pretty good code, although I had a bit of trouble with the <!–more–> separator. You can always change back to the old “raw” input, on a per-user basis.

• At least, the options say Personal Options (including rich v plain editor) “are just for you, they don’t affect other users on blog.” But I can’t work out how to add multiple users. I guess that’s a feature that hasn’t been implemented yet, so group blogs are ruled out for now. (However, the new user system in 1.6 is pretty sweet, and I expect it will find its way onto WordPress.com when the rough edges are knocked off.)

• One concern I’ve got is comment spam. Although the new service appears to have the same “spam words” interface as WordPress, it really needs plugins to do a thorough job. The increase of spam on Blogger blogs shows that this will be a real problem, and it’d be nice to know what is going on behind the scenes to filter spam.

• Come to think of it, there’s no way to use plugins at all. That’s one of the biggest benefits of using WordPress (or Movable Type) instead of Blogger. It’d be great to see them allow plugins in future, though it would no doubt pose some technical/security difficulties.

• The invite system is integrated with your blogroll, so you can tick a box and the invitee will be added to your blogroll automatically when they activate their account. Nice touch.

Speaking of invites, if you want to give it a go you should sign up on the front page of WordPress.com. Of course, if you can’t wait your turn, I have one “golden ticket” to give away to someone who can convince me they’d put the blog to good use. Leave a comment if you’re interested.

Update: I’d really like to give the invite to a commenter (or a lurker, for that matter) who wants to give blogging a burl. They’ll jump the queue ahead of people who are already blogging.

Here’s a game that I have stolen from Ruth and Dan. Listen to the intros to ten songs, email me your guesses (title and artist), and the most accurate wins a prize. (I don’t know what the prize is yet, but there will be one…)

A leaked extract of the Latham Diaries…

James McConvill clearly can’t hack the blogosphere. After being criticised by various stalwarts of the Australian blog scene, notably fellow academics Mark Bahnisch and Andrew Norton, he has pruned back his blog significantly. However, several of his “disappeared” posts are still available if you know where to look.

• Courting Bright Sparks Rather than “Bullies”
• Professor Bagaric- A Great Leader and Intellectual (a few posts down)

At first it was not clear why McConvill decided to pull the first of these, on the type of judge who should be appointed to fill the vacancy that will be created when Justice McHugh retires from the High Court. However, its conclusion that the Government should “appoint a shining star of similar capacity to Kirby” only serves to emphasise how farcical is the second:

Within the next 10 years the complete composition of the current High Court of Australia will have retired. To replace them, as I have suggested in an op-ed published in The Canberra Times last week, we need real leaders with great minds and proven capability. Professor Bagaric should be placed on the waiting list. If the High Court could be transformed in a similar way as Professor Bagaric has done with Deakin Law School, we could enjoy two great legal institutions in this country.

Mirko Bagaric made a name for himself by advocating torture in a law review article. As Mark Bahnisch pointed out,

by publishing in a student edited law review, and a fairly obscure one at that, [Bagaric] avoided the sort of scrutiny through peer review that is fundamental to the testing of academic arguments.

It seems that the Great Leader and Intellectual’s approach rubbed off on his staff at the Deakin Law School, which leads me to the other McConvill posts that vanished from his blog:

• On Bullshit and Australian Academics
• The Ugly State of Australian Law Reviews
• After a Real Legal Academic? Turn To The Op-Ed Page

These three were presumably removed out of embarrassment following the Deakin Law Review’s decision to publish an article by racist academic Drew Fraser. When I saw the headline announcing that Fraser’s views would be published, I knew it would be by Deakin, because Bagaric is head of the law school and McConvill edits the law review. With that publicity-seeking pair running the show, it was almost inevitable that they would seek out Fraser — a man who not only has links to a neonazi organisation but also calls for race riots because “one could be forgiven for thinking that one is in Hong Kong when entering the library or other public spaces on campus.”

Unlike the University of San Francisco Law Review, which gave Bagaric’s torture bit a run, Deakin’s journal is peer reviewed. The idea of peer review is to provide a safeguard as to quality, by giving established academics with experience in the relevant field an opportunity to evaluate the article before publication. However, the process seems to have fallen over in this case:

Journal policy was to act on advice from “double blind” academic review — neither author nor reviewer should know each other’s identity.

But Professor Fraser’s authorship was clear to two potential reviewers who “rejected it in terms of not wanting to consider it”, Mr McConvill said.

Two other reviewers — a legal academic and a sociologist with expertise in the White Australia policy — advised publication.

The suggestion seems to be that the first reviewers couldn’t do the job because they could identify Fraser’s authorship, but I think you’d struggle to find someone who couldn’t. Naturally, they can’t tell us who finally approved the article, but I’d say neither are strangers to controversial polemics dressed up as academic work. My guess is that the legal academic is on the law review’s editorial board, and the sociologist features in Fraser’s article as a “tender minded” chap whose defence of White Australia was not strong enough.

Of course, if Fraser has been given an easy ride due to Deakin’s headline-grabbing approach, that will be very clear when it is published in October. I have very little doubt that Fraser’s article will be demolished, and McConvill will be embarrassed for allowing it to be published in the first place.

It is tempting to think, as Sinclair Davidson does, that we should wait until the article is published, “give the guy a fair trial, then hang him.” The problem is that by then it is too late. Racists have already used Fraser’s status to bolster their (and his) repugnant beliefs, including the need for racist violence. However, he has not yet published anything on the topic. When they can point to an academic article that vindicates their claims — in a peer reviewed law journal, no less — any criticism in subsequent volumes will be irrelevant. Fraser and his neonazi mates will have what they were after, and will use it to legitimise their toxic beliefs.

It is because of this that I am in two minds about the threatened lawsuit. On one hand, I agree with Charles Richardson that freedom of thought is fundamental to a university, and that such cases can have a significant chilling effect. The argument is all the stronger when we are talking about a reputable, peer-reviewed journal that does not publish lightly.

However, if the review process has been diluted in the name of controversy, then the scales tip towards prosecution for racial vilification. As I argued above, pseudo-academic writings form the platform on which violent racism is based. Drew Fraser has links to the Patriotic Youth League, a neonazi organisation that has been accused of waging a race-hate campaign against African students. Fraser has also suggested that race riots might be necessary as some kind of racist “propaganda by deed”. In these circumstances, it may be appropriate to question whether the usual academic privilege ought to apply.

If the Deakin Law Review has allowed itself to be used to further a violent racist agenda, then it should be held to account.

Update: Alas, Google’s cache is quickly losing those blog posts.

Late last year Media Watch criticised Liberal spin doctor Grahame Morris for misleading people about his affiliations. Although he tagged himself as a “former advisor to John Howard”, there was nothing former about it — he was still providing advice during the 2004 election campaign. He tried to avoid lying by saying he was “the former chief of staff for John Howard”, but did not disclose his close involvement in the Liberal campaign strategy.

It appears that Morris is up to his old tricks, as he was introduced on Lateline last Friday as “Grahame Morris, former staffer to John Howard and now an adviser to PriceWaterhouseCoopers”. The implication is clear: he used to work in politics, but now he’s an advisor to an accounting firm. He’s not a Liberal hack any more.

But that’s just not true.

After the ACTU started kicking Kevin Andrews’ arse on industrial relations, John Howard decided he couldn’t trust his lacklustre minister to run the campaign. He put together a team of backbenchers to babysit Andrews, and called the Liberal Party’s media strategists up for action: Andrew Robb, Ted Horton — and Grahame Morris:

Gossip spread through public relations and union offices this week when the media consultant and former adviser to Mr Howard, Graeme Morris, declined to discuss the industrial changes on ABC Radio due to a conflict of interest.

Yesterday Mr Morris confirmed that his firm, Jackson Wells Morris, had begun advising the Government on the issue on Thursday, and would be working closely with the taskforce.

Morris was right about his conflict of interest in July, but it hasn’t gone away. The Lateline debate didn’t touch on industrial relations, so there’s no problem with Morris participating — as long as he’s open about his status as an advisor to the Howard Government.

There’s nothing “former” about it.

Update: Responding to Media Watch last year, Morris said it was absurd that he should “announce who I have talked to over the last few months… not just who pays me.” Perhaps — but this time that excuse isn’t available to him.

• The Tasmanian Government reiterated its intention to quarantine as many workers as possible from the Howard Government’s IR changes. Kevin Andrews said it was futile because “if there’s a clash between federal and state law then the federal laws prevail so it just is grandstanding and the State Government knows that.” But John Howard was not so confident, and sidestepped questions on the issue.

• Kevin Andrews also called on the Tasmanian Government to voluntarily cede its IR powers to the Commonwealth — but he hasn’t even convinced the Tasmanian Liberals: “State Opposition Leader Rene Hidding also confirmed he would not be calling for the Tasmanian system of industrial relations to be abolished or disbanded.”

• Carolyn Sutherland has serious concerns about the impact of Howard’s industrial relations scheme: “By abolishing the no-disadvantage test and removing the commission’s role in scrutinising agreements, fundamental entitlements may well be bargained away without due consideration of the effect on family and community life.” Dr Don Edgar sees it as an attack on working families: “None of this looks family-friendly or equitable, and offers flexibility not for the workers but for a boss wanting to screw the last dollar out of the last breath of effort, for workers already struggling to meet their reciprocal work and family responsibilities.” And Ross Fitzgerald says we should not ignore “draconian welfare changes that aim to create a desperate class of mothers, injured and disabled all willing to take up work on the low-wage, insecure jobs that will come about from the IR changes.”

• A poll commissioned by the AMWU, which sought the opinions of 600 workers in Coalition-held marginal seats around the country, found overwhelming opposition to Howard’s IR agenda.

• Unions are planning to make 15 November a “historic day” of community protest against the Howard Government. The ACTU’s Sharran Burrow predicted “it will be the biggest workers’ rally ever as the union movement uses Sky Channel to link workers in country towns, regional centres and capital cities.” Put it in your diaries, and make any leave arrangements you need to get time off work.

• Evatt Foundation president Bruce Childs says, “In my view, the sleeper issue that will emerge, is the way pensioners over a period of time will lose out. The pension is determined on average weekly wages. … If minimum wage increases can be slowed down, then, over time, pensioners will suffer.” At a public forum in rural NSW, union secretary John Robertson made a similar point: “If those wages are frozen or reduced it will have a direct impact on the pension as it will stop it going up. Don’t be fooled into believing that the IR changes just relate to work because they don’t.”