Morality and the IR Reforms

I always think it's interesting when institutions who claim a market share of morality and 'family values' get involved in public debate, as has happened recently with the Christian Churches (and the Diggers' Lobby and the self-appointed saviour of the nuclear family) over the pending Industrial Relations reforms. Institutions like these, while working pretty constantly in the justice arena (in the case of the major churches, anyway) generally only get a reasonable media run on the most personal issues, like abortion, or charity, or, like, God and stuff.

The immense media response to the Churches proclamations that the reforms are immoral (see here for the Uniting Church's particularly strong anti-Government reform statement), not intuitively a huge moral issue, is a little puzzling. Why does the media want a moral opinion on what would normally be treated as an economic reform?

It occurs to me that this level of media attention is a direct and proportionate response to the Government's rhetoric. Deliberately, intuitively, Howard has positioned the reforms as an issue of freedom, choice and the common good - on the playing field of Western (Judeo-Christian influenced, whether we like it or not) values - in order to justify why he is promoting individual bargaining over collective, to explain why he doesn't want unions 'interfering', claiming that we are all equal before the law and according to his argument have equal power. In doing so, he has opened himself up to criticism based on morals and values.

While this was coming solely from the union movement, he could dismiss it as grandstanding, but when the Churches and members of parliament become involved, the whole thing backfires on him. Suddenly, union claims that penalty rates are necessary to ensure adequate compensation for lost leisure time, easy to dismiss as extending from sectional interests cos he's already cast unions as irrelevant, become recast as big-picture moral claims - that people need to connect with society, that the Sabbath should be respected as a day of rest and relaxation for the whole community, that common holidays are there to enable public and community interconnection and foster national pride, and that religious traditions should be respected. All things attached to White traditions that Howard has used time and time again to invoke electoral fear against people of other traditions and faiths, to glorify frugal budgetary spending and corollary cutting of basic services, to create electorally-exploitable barriers and divisions, to justify fostering our relationship with America instead of expanding into the non-White region, the list goes on and on and...

The people have shown that they respond to moral guidance that accords with their own interests. But with these reforms, it's just not clear why they won't kill the hip pocket and the family time, and make it less fair, for non-professional, non-managerial workers. So, I reckon, if the Government claims that its reforms are 'for society', the people want to know what moral bodies think. It's backfired gloriously.

Poor, silly Billy runs out of puff

Some things to think about from the Government’s new workplace relations package:

EXAMPLE

Billy is an unemployed job seeker who is offered a full-time job as a shop assistant by Costas who owns a clothing retail store in Canberra. The clothing store is covered by a federal award. The job offered to Billy is contingent on him accepting an AWA. The AWA Billy is offered provides him with the relevant minimum award classification wage and explicitly removes other award conditions.
As Billy is making an agreement under WorkChoices the AWA being offered to him must at least meet the Fair Pay and Conditions Standard.The AWA Billy is offered explicitly removes award conditions for public holidays, rest breaks, bonuses, annual leave loadings, allowances, penalty rates and shift/overtime loadings. Billy has a bargaining agent assisting him in considering the AWA. He understands the details of what is in the AWA and the protections that the Fair
Pay and Conditions Standard will give him including annual leave,
personal/carer's leave, parental leave and maximum ordinary hours of work. Because Billy wants to get a foothold in the job market, he agrees to the AWA and accepts the job offer.

Poor Billy. As Liam has noted, he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. It becomes disgusting when you investigate half-truths circulated by the Government about the reforms – in this case, the myth that you are protected by law from being forced into signing an AWA, that it is a choice.

As can be deduced from poor Billy’s fate, the High court has ruled that making an AWA a condition of employment does not constitute ‘duress’ under the Act Never mind that in a depressed regional jobmarket where Billy’s skills as a wigmaker are redundant or non-existent, Billy may be forced by economic necessity to sign over his rights for a song. This apparently isn’t duress, which in the spirit of the Act is instead understood mainly in commercial terms as though the labour contract were a commercial contract, as though the employment relationship were the same as any other contractual relationship, as though the labour market were like any other market, as though selling your labour were the same as selling paperclips, as though, like a commercial entity, Billy didn’t need to eat or maintain non-commercially-essential personal relationships, and if his product, his labour, was substandard he should be allowed to fold, ensuring a healthy competitive market and a sloughing off of the dead weight of society.

So much for a society that refuses to separate labour from people, and that fights to protect the vulnerable. The Government’s promises that nobody can be forced to sign an AWA under law ring very hollow. Billy can’t even access the only remedy available to him, litigation through the court system, unless he has already signed the AWA. If he is merely in the process of being forced to sign it, there are no protections and no penalties, no friends to help him other than the union which frankly can’t do anything. The erroneously-named Employment Advocate does not have the power to investigate or bring the case until Billy himself realises he’s been hard done by. Even if Billy could prove that he had signed the damned thing under the weird and strict definition of ‘duress’, he would have to fork out his money to get penalties applied to the organisation, and he wouldn’t get ordered costs either. It would be a Pyrrhic principle fight, which he would probably lose anyway.

Problem: The Hub is Dirty

Upcoming ABC National Breakfast programme: interested?

Last month it was reported that central Sydney was being starved of basic-wage workers, such as cleaners, room maids or waiting staff, simply because they cannot afford to live within reasonable travelling distance from the city.The problem raises once more the question of how cities can provide affordable housing close to the hub, rather than forcing the less well-off to become urban fringe-dwellers, while the convenience and lifestyle of the city becomes the reserve of the privileged.

What's needed is not just cheap housing, but housing that's located where people need to live and which is appropriate for a rapidly changing demographic, which for instance is seeing more people living on their own. It's time to seriously question developers who continue to serve up one size fits all housing as new estates sprawl farther out from the city.

Guests on this program:David Brown Architect David Brown is a Director of Wentworth Brown, a design management market research and policy development practice.

Further information:Read a summary of David Brown's report

Story Producer: Mark Wakely

But Who Is Tony Burke?

Well, I'm not really sure. But I do know one thing. He had this to say in his maiden speech:

When we acknowledge the incredible strength and richness of the many cultures which make our nation so vibrant, from Indigenous Australians through to the most recent immigrant, it has an impact on how Australians relate to each other at the workplace, in the shopping centre and in the playground. When members of this chamber talk, very few people tune in and certainly none of the under-fives in that Greenacre playground listen to the broadcasts, but somehow the message gets out. When members here demean others, divide communities and vilify some of the most vulnerable people, those people do not have to be listening to feel the hurt.

I'm not sure what this means in terms of, like, you know, "illegals" and all them. But he's picked up on a key problem with The Old, whose disdain for his constituents did occasionally filter out to divide the broad community and vilify vulnerable people, like mentally ill detainee Peter Qasim:

"I don't bemoan, I don't assail the release of Peter Qasim," he said.

"However, I think there's quite a bit of debate about how co-operative he's been with the department in basically establishing identity and ethnicity.

"I say the question of defining people such as him as stateless is a worrying precedent.

"Statelessness is basically about those people who don't have documentation and can't be returned because of their situation.

"If it's a question of someone not co-operating, not signing documents, not really being definite about who they are and where they come from is a different matter."

Good to know that he's not bemoaning. I'd get a bit sick of unmedicated mentally ill people being un-cooperative with a department that I had no input into, too, if I was the shadow minister for immigration. I mean, like, God, if the government can't do it's job, it's because they're having a rough trot with all those illegals, and it's hardly his place to condemn something that he knows nothing about. Yeah. Yeah.

Against Indefinite Detention

Your say on the private member's bills to end indefinite detention for asylum seekers -
go here.

It's a real exercise, requiring your full name and address for verification reasons. You can state your opposition to the bill as well, if that's your yen.

Schapadlock II

The Schapadlock, reproduced faithfully on this site by our own Dibo, has been claimed.

On Thursday, the Daily Telegraph's very classy "Confidential" section ran a celebration of bad-taste Schappelle jokes that had been circulating amongst the city's young and technologically hip, including said Schapadlock.

The staff of Confidential were amused that afternoon to receive a note of thanks as well as an entire Ham from the David Jones Food Hall and a certificate for 'Mateship in Journalism' from comedy outfit The Third Degree, who had created the Schocking image.

I can exclusively reveal that an Unnamed Source from inside The Third Degree feels that Ham is the way forward in thankyou gifts.

Shame, Laurie, Shame.

Margo Kingston is hosting a web forum on the mandatory detention bills, wherein punters can post their letters and replies from their MPs. Here.

I was horrified and shocked to read this reply to what seemed like a fairly inoccuous letter from one Justin Whelan.

Oh, Shame.