The minimum wage will be set by "God's will", the head of the Howard Government's new Fair Pay Commission said yesterday.
Marmot argues that there is a 'social gradient' that operates along the entire occupational and social hierarchy, meaning the more egalitarian a society the higher the life expectancy.
Where an individual lies on this hierarchy carries a direct link to life expectancy and fatal illnesses from conditions as diverse as stroke, heart disease, cancer, mental illness and gastro-intestinal disease.
The social gradient even operates in white-collar workplaces where employees are not poor or exposed to dangerous or hazardous work environments.
The report 'The Shape of Things To Come' finds that the industrial relations changes will inevitably widen inequality by pushing down the minimum wage and promoting individual work contracts. This creates a steeper social gradient.
This was John Howard, one year ago yesterday, responding to the unexpected news that an extraordinary result in Queensland had handed him control of the Senate and, with it, the opportunity to implement his program in full. To make his message crystal clear, the Prime Minister added another caveat: "We intend to do the things we've promised the Australian people we would do, but we don't intend to allow this unexpected but welcome majority in the Senate to go to our heads."
Yet, in the coming week, the Howard Government intends to introduce two of the most substantial pieces of legislation in its near decade in power — and rush them through Parliament at almost breakneck speed.
Neither was canvassed during last year's election campaign, for understandable reasons, but both raise questions about whether the Government's Senate majority is being used carefully, wisely and in an unprovocative manner.
In the annual Lionel Murphy lecture in Sydney, Mr Hawke described the changes as an attempt to destroy the trade union movement and the arbitration system.
Mr Hawke says the workplace changes were an attempt to destroy the arbitration system and the trade union movement."It is wrong. It is unfair. It is un-Australian. It is immoral," he said.
He says the laws will allow employers to use individual workplace agreements to cut workers' pay and conditions, such as public holidays, penalties and meal breaks.
And he took issue with the proposed Fair Pay Commission.
"This is simply a monstrous trick on the least privileged workers in our society," he said.
Rosa Parks, a black seamstress whose refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., almost 50 years ago grew into a mythic event that helped touch off the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's, died yesterday at her home in Detroit. She was 92 years old.The former chief justice Sir Anthony Mason said recently that it was essential that adequate time be allowed for public and parliamentary debate of new counter-terrorism laws.
"It would be disappointing, to say the least of it, if full and frank debate were not to take place for fear that those who stand up for civil rights will be labelled as 'soft' on security," he said in a speech this month.
Gough Whitlam, the former prime minister, has attacked the proposed anti-terrorism laws which would allow Australians to be "interned", and then face criminal charges if they spoke to their families or employers about it.
Calling for more debate on the proposals, Mr Whitlam yesterday accused the Howard Government of using fear as an election winner. He lamented the fact that the Labor Party had not joined in opposing the proposed laws.
Urging more time for debate, Mr Whitlam said: "Like anything, it should be open to debate in the Parliament. Sure, Parliament is a talking shop - that's what the word means - but Parliament makes the laws."
He said: "My main worry is the fact that, under the proposed laws, Australians can be interned and it's a crime for people to speak to their families and employers about it."
As there are only 100,000 jobs on offer in Australia at the moment and officially 500,000 people looking for work (plus 800,000 on disability or child care pensions) there will be many people who will find these conditions attractive, even in these buoyant economic times; imagine what will happen when the unemployment situation gets worse.
For this reason the end result of these changes could be the moving of employment from those unwilling to sacrifice important time with their families to the desperate or those without family responsibilities. This is not a good move.
She may not be a household name here, but Brand is a significant figure in Australian arts history, a pioneer of theatre who was unafraid to lace her stories with radical ideas.Australian Financial Review 20/10/05
Expanding the old sedition offence will also stretch the translation skills, interpretation and objectivity of ASIO and its cohorts.
Tragically, the sedition provisions were last used in 1960 in the prosecution of Brian Cooper, who was a patrol officer in Papua New Guinea. He was charged and convicted because - in pidgin English - "he advisedly spoke and published seditious words" when urging "the natives" to demand national independence. He lost his appeal to the High Court of Australia and committed suicide.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was agreed in 1948. In the years since, protocols and conventions established under it were designed to build a law-based world. The International Criminal Court finally came into force on 1 July 2002. This was a further major step in that direction.
It is more than unfortunate that our response to terrorism has reversed much of that progress and leaders in too many countries do not seem to understand that that is happening.The Government knows in relation to terrorism that the public is concerned, even fearful and can be made more fearful. These laws again play to conservative elements in Australian society.
It may be brilliant politics but will such laws make Australia secure? By its actions, the Government has long abandoned and lost the middle ground. The Rule of Law and "due process" has been set aside. Has the Government already created an environment in which people will accept too much if the Government says it will help in the fight against terrorism?
These new proposals should be opposed. No strong case has been made that these breaches in the Rule of Law will be effective in the fight against terrorism. The London bombings are probably used as a rationale, but apply these laws to London bombings, they could not succeed. The laws should be opposed on the basis of substance. The powers are arbitrary altering the quality of ASIO and of the police in significant ways. There are no real safe guards, there is no adequate judicial review.
The laws should be opposed because the process itself is seriously flawed. Instead of wide ranging discussion the Government has sought to nobble the field in secret and to prevent debate. The laws should be opposed because they provide arbitrary power which would be dependent on trust, a trust that has not been earnt.
There's another job that could be put at risk by these needless workplace changes - John Howard's. What Howard is proposing is the kind of change that costs governments elections, and flings parties into the wilderness, writes Tim Colebatch.
The draft legislation, disclosed by by Greens yesterday, details the far-reaching security regime proposed by John Howard for "very dangerous and difficult and threatening circumstances" in the wake of the London bombings.
New sedition offences will put big constraints on anti-war protests, familiar since the Vietnam era, and come down hard on those advocating violence against any religious, national or political group.
read more
draft Terror bill
.
.
Maritime Union of Australia National Secretary Paddy Crumlin returned from Tokyo on the weekend after chairing negotiations with international shipowners that have won better pay and conditions for world seafarers on more than 3,000 ships. The outcome also provides job prospects and security for Australian maritime workers in a new international collective agreement, unique in global industrial relations.
Public support for the wharfies during the 1998 Patrick Stevedores dispute was consolidated by a maritime union court victory preventing the employer from effectively shedding its entire unionised workforce. This victory was made possible, in part, because Patrick was required to prove that it did not threaten to dismiss its employees on the basis that they were union members. It failed to do so.
They would like to abolish the AIRC but can't as it is part of the Australian Constitution, so they intend to gut it instead.
bring us into line with with inferior US standards and no doubt comply with the "Free Trade" agreement and bind the Howard government even closer to the super power source of all its ideas and dreams.Why not? Because the empirical evidence in support of such claims is a lot weaker than the urgers ever let on.
There's a lot of fashion in economics. At present, it's the height of fashion to believe that deregulating the labour market is the key to improving the economy's performance.
Just achieve a more "flexible" labour market and you'll get lower unemployment, higher productivity, faster economic growth and improved material living standards.
How do you make the labour market more flexible? Weaken unions, lower minimum wages, lessen employment protection laws and discourage collective bargaining.
These assertions are made unceasingly not just by almost all our local econocrats but also by the international econocrats of the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
"That the world has achieved little in this respect makes active opposition to nuclear arms all the more important today," the committee said..
US President George Bush has claimed he was told by God to attack Afghanistan and invade Iraq as part of a divine mission to bring peace to the Middle East
read more
Archbishop Watson told his diocesan synod that the "corporate model which judges success by the criteria of the balance sheet short-changes us, as if that is all that matters. Civilised society is not an extension of the corporate world. The corporate world should exist to serve the interest and wellbeing of a caring society."This is a chance for Australian voters and workers to express the sense of betrayal and disillusionment they have for the Federal Government with the main by-line on the postcard stating, 'I didn't vote for an attack on my rights at work.'
To download the post card go to:
http://actu.asn.au/work_rights/tools_resources/
.
Unions would be forced to disclose the sources of their funding under a toughening of electoral laws to be revealed by the Federal Government tonight.
The Special Minister of State, Eric Abetz, says that unions and other non-government groups should be listed as associated entities under the Electoral Act because "they exist almost solely for the benefit of the Labor Party".
Senator Abetz, who is preparing to take the plan for electoral reform to cabinet this month, is also examining ways to toughen up disclosure requirements for the Australian Conservation Foundation, WWF Australia, the Wilderness Society and the RSPCA.
In Sydney's Rocks area close to Observatory Hill is the Garrison Church, much used for weddings."THEY that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." (Benjamin Franklin, 1759)
"It must be a matter of serious concern that the leaders have agreed to assist the Commonwealth to circumvent one of the fundamental human rights protections contained in the Australian constitution." (John von Doussa, 2005)
When these new anti-terrorism measures become law, police can arrest whoever they like, people as young as 16, and imprison them for 14 days if they have "reasonable grounds" for believing they pose a terrorist threat.
What those reasonable grounds might be is anyone's guess. The fundamental principle of the presumption of innocence is out the window.
On top of that, "suspects" could be tagged with electronic tracking devices or held under house arrest for up to a year, again without charge. This would be subject to judicial review but - and here's the crunch - a review only to determine that the letter of the law had been obeyed. The judge would not be permitted to establish if there was factual evidence for branding any person a terrorist suspect.
Nor is there any mechanism to guard against these periods of detention, either 14 days or a year, being rolled over indefinitely. Detainees could be released, then re-arrested within minutes.
