“I tell you what the problem of that is, is that those people will be hand-picked by the union bosses.”
“This is a political device to give the impression of modernity but in reality it will hand back even greater power to union bosses,”
Run for your lives!!!!! The Unions are a-comin’ o’er them hills!!!! It’s doom and gloom for Australia if Labor gets into power. You’ll have wall-to-wall Labor and it’ll all be controlled by those evil Union thugs.
Such was the rhetoric from Little Johnny Howler this morning when interview by Fran Kelly on Radio National Breakfast. In fact he had Bannerman laughing out loud with his spittle-spraying, frothy-mouthed response to Labor’s announcement of a dismantling of the moribund Australian Industrial Relations Commission, which his government made obsolete over 12 months ago by pulling out its dentures and handing them to Ian Harper.
The idea of a single arbitrary body for wage case assessment, fair and minimum pay level setting and settlement of industrial disputation seems a much better avenue than the current seperate offices of the Employment Advocate, Fair Pay Commission and on life support for the interim, the AIRC. Yet Little Johnny says his multiple levels of obsolescence and biased IR structures weighted in favour of the employer are far better. Bannerman supposes that at the least, multiple levels of bureaucracy give people jobs. At taxpayer expense, of course, but that’s never bothered a conservative government.
Of course, it’s all a union controlled plot, cooked up by Greg Combet, et al. Why else would this announcement have been made on last nights 7:30 Report, then immediately backed up by pre-recorded, confirmatory sound bites from Combet and Burrows? Hmmm……maybe it had something to do with Peter Hendy and Heather Ridout being unavailable? Who knows, but certainly one would expect that if business and industry were as aghast as LJH clearly is, they’d have had their voices added to his by this morning? Alas, Johnny, not a peep out of industry reps.
But the Unions!!!!?? Those dastardly, conniving, iniquitous, scheming Union bosses?!!!! They’re all communists, y’know! Most of ’em are probably gay as well and infected with HIV. Yes indeedy, better gird your loins, or whatever it is one is supposed to do when the Unions come to town, ‘cos they’re a-comin’.