Why on earth would I care about what he says. Was he their? Perhaps if we didn't live in a world with such biased media we would find the real answers.

i have made no comment regarding this MP in Victoria...... seems like you are guilty of what you accuse me of......

Al Capone was never convicted of racketeering, running the mob, killing people......so i assume he is innocent as well?????? seeing it was never proven....

all it takes in the HSU to want to press charges and away we go....but that won't happen when the union and Labor are bedp fellows..
Wheres the presumption of innocence ? Like the Murdoch media youre willing to paint him guilty . Just like the victorian mp that was hounded by the herald sun saying his guilty , but what happens he was proven innocent .if it was abott you'll be saying
Innocent to proven guilty.

Also what's wrong with unions? They represent us workers who work for some companies who don't care about their workers but care about their shareholders .

This is the perfect world description of what a Trade Union does, unfortunately this is not a perfect world.

Going from working for the ACTU to being on the other side of business/people management, I've seen the best and absolute worst that Unions have to offer.

Also what's wrong with unions? They represent us workers who work for some companies who don't care about their workers but care about their shareholders .

Edited by mvfcarsenal16.8: 22/5/2012 04:44:18 PM

Problem is once the unions are gone the companies will run riot . I've seen some work places that had. No union the place was filled by illegal Chinese workers that the company got and made them work 15 hour days for a pittance . That company still. does it , also oh&s is non existant there

The point being that Unions are effective if they are there to keep companies accountable by sticking to the letter of the law & due process. What usually ends up happening is that once these things become commonplace the Union needs to start agitating on irrelevant or lawful practices to justify their existence to their membership base and expand their fee collection pool. This leads to further employer/employee animosity and then situations like destroying MP's offices and headbutting foremen at worksites etc.

I long for the day that Unions are redundant.

Soft and materialistic, we won't cope with the next depression

May 22, 2012 - 3:08PM

In the hundred and thirty-nine years before the Great Depression, New South Wales produced just four millionaires.

I remember coming across that striking little factoid somewhere during the research for Leviathan. That’s not a lot of lolly for a colony so ‘‘wealthy’’ that the British Parliament worried for a while that convict transportation was encouraging crime in London, by providing a guaranteed ticket to the promised land for the underclass of England. Partly that was a function of a more equal distribution of income in those days. The Australian colonies really were a promised land. But also we forget sometimes just how insanely wealthy we are, at least as a whole, compared with the past. (Jessica Irvine did a great piece on our utter cluelessness and consequent selfishness last week, that’s still worth a read this week if you haven’t done so yet.) The past wasn’t just another country. It was a much poorer one.

I got to pondering this the last week or so, fretting over the finance news out of Europe. (Gotta keep myself busy when the Diablo 3 servers are down). It’s entirely possible the European economic experiment could collapse in the next few months, taking with it trillions of dollars and the settled order on the continent that we have assumed as a given since 1945. It’s possible two or three years from now that we’ll look back on these pinched and fractious days as something of a golden period, an idyll before the world passed into darkness. Increasingly, I find myself wondering what that’ll be like.

Having studied the depressions of the 1930s and 1890s I feel like I have some idea of just how far societies can fall. In the ‘30s for instance, thousands of houses and apartments stood empty in Sydney and Melbourne while tens of thousands of people lived rough on the edge of the cities. The rabbits of Centennial Park didn’t need bio-warfare raining down on them to thin out their numbers. Hungry trappers did well enough. The faces of working people, or non-working people I guess, in photos from those days are thin and haunted by the prospect of starvation. Mass violence was ever possible.

As grim as it was, however, Australians then were not rich or even comfortably well off before the crash laid them low. We’d think of their lives as hard and severely constrained. That’s what I wonder about any darkness that might descend on us. When the madness finally breaks through all the makeshift defences we’ve run up around Greece and Spain and Italy and maybe even around France; what then? How will we - the softest, most materialist culture in Western history - cope when it all goes horribly wrong?

Firstly, I suppose, we'll probably tweet and Facebook the hell out of it.


Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/blogs/blunt-instrument/soft-and-materialistic-we-wont-cope-with-the-next-depression-20120521-1z19q.html#ixzz1vbHZknQH

I don't think I have ever more strongly agreed with someone on these forums.

I've been on both sides of the table, I've been a worker both under a union and in a workplace that wasn't covered by a union, and i'm currently an employer.

I hear people like MvFCArsenal say these comments all the time that employers will just ride over the rights of the workers, blah blah blah, import cheap asian workers, ra ra ra (never actually seen that happen mind you) but as an employer I can assure you that that is just a giant load of bullshit that the union movement pushes to increase their membership.

As an employer, let me tell you, we NEED employee's! We are nothing without them, so this idea that we would treat employees like shit if we were left unchecked is like saying we would go off and tie our own hands behind our back if the unions weren't around to supervise us! Because let me tell you, if you can't hold onto your workers because you keep treating them like shit, then it is exactly like trying to work with your hands tied behind your back! No business runs itself, every business needs workers, the better the workers, the better the business! It really is that simple and employers ARE smart enough to work out the most basic facts of business, believe it or not...

Unions paint employers like boogey monsters, but at the end of the day, we are the people who allow you to pay your mortgages, and you are the people who allow us to pay ours! It should be a good relationship, but all too frequently union reps get involved and fuck the relationship right up!

EMINENT public health campaigner David Penington has condemned political leaders over their failure to engage in a debate on drug use reform.

Professor Penington, whose inquiry recommended the Kennett government decriminalise marijuana, said he was not surprised by the negative reaction by Prime Minister Julia Gillard to the recent Australia21 report calling for a drugs debate.

''That's why she's taken the position she's taken on gay marriage and all those sort of things, because she's appealing to the uneducated, conservative emotional reactions to all sorts of things,'' he told The Age.

The former Melbourne University vice-chancellor said courageous leadership was ''not part of our political system at the moment on either side of politics. They just don't want to know.''

The Australia21 think tank report said that 400 Australians were dying each year from illicit drug use, and thousands more suffered from drug dependence, unsafe injecting and infections.

Australia21 argued that discussion of drug policy had been largely absent, except as an excuse for being tough on law and order. The report said it was time to reopen the debate on drug use and control.

Professor Penington's 1996 inquiry report to the Kennett government called for the decriminalisation of marijuana for personal use, in an effort to break the nexus between marijuana and harder drugs.

After indicating he was considering the reform, Jeff Kennett changed his view. A growing revolt from the state Liberal and National parties was perceived to be behind the change.

But Mr Kennett said his views had changed after conducting more research into the potential dangers of the drug.

Mr Kennett, who heads beyondblue, said he was now more opposed than ever. ''I now have substantial evidence, research from around the world … that marijuana, consistently used, and in the hands of someone with a chemical make-up that might be looser than others can have a very damaging effect,'' he told The Age.

The former president of the Hawthorn Football Club also rounded on the AFL over moves to take marijuana off the list of performance enhancing drugs for players.

''It is true that marijuana is not a performance-enhancing drug. I agree with that and therefore they are technically right. But the message they are sending us in my opinion is terribly wrong,'' he said.

''It is better to stay with the message of being opposed to drugs and to preventing their spread and abuse than to, in my opinion, argue the technicality and therefore say to people, particularly players and others, 'it's all right to have the drug'.''

http://www.theage.com.au/national/drug-expert-slams-political-leaders-20120522-1z39m.html

she is such quality......ruling by default

You do realise that if Abbott is elected, it won't be because of anything positive he's done right? He would be the epitome of ruling by default, and he has been the epitome of appealing to the

Gay marragie is a personal issue and if anything happens it should be a conscience vote. I'm not the biggest fan of it.

Interesting that batfink has now adopted "class war" into his hyperbole after hearing Tony Abbott's budget reply and subsequent media outlets jumping on the bandwagon.

I thought you were objective, mate?

Why would you allow a "conscience vote" on the rights of others?

life isn't black and white, some people may only object to "gay marriage" due to their religious beliefs.....and you talk of the rights of others but ignore the rights of those who may object to it........

hang on it's your comments that instigate that.....stupid comments like "uneducated, conservative emotional reactions".

life isn't black and white, some people may only object to "gay marriage" due to their religious beliefs.....and you talk of the rights of others but ignore the rights of those who may object to it........

Just to make things clear i'm not on a hardline stance, I could be swayed but it's not really my cup of tea.

They weren't my comments, it was quote - hence the "quotation" marks.



I need to respect the rights of people to withhold rights from other people?

doesn't mean the rest of the population does.....just because that's what you think doesn't mean everyone else does........