On the Workplace Relations Act previously know as WorkChoices

What a joke to replace unfair dismissal laws and the no disadvantage test with a ‘fairness test’ – how 1984! Don’t they know that prevention is better than cure?

Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) and the power disparity between most workers and employers....

Now, you might think it would be in an employer's interests to make his employee's happy, just as it's in a general's interests to keep his soldiers alive, but sometimes the interests of the company are considered more important than a single worker’s pay or a single soldier’s life, aren’t they? People who have interests that are divergent to yours can’t be responsible for your interests. You don’t have to be Spock to figure that out.

If you don’t have a union then you are on your own in a very unequal fight – he who controls the pay-packet controls the strings. How many people: can’t be replaced; are in high demand; and can ask whatever in the way of remuneration? If you can’t say yes to these things then you have no bargaining power. (And let’s face it, even if you do have these things they may not be the coin of the day – you may simply be replaced by someone younger and cuter.)

Unions don’t have a lot of power. A union gives you access to people who know the law and where you stand. It gives you people that you’ve paid to look after your interests as you travel along the employment road. Hopefully they will sort things before the issue becomes one for a court. In extreme circumstances it gives the power of the strike, which is really the only power employees will ever have, so don’t disrespect it or think of it as something horrible that evil people do.

The government has gone to a lot of effort to sully the image of unions (and ok sometimes they don’t help themselves – who hasn’t met that disreputable union rep who spends all his time in the TAB and do they all smoke?). Like Unions, the government is supposed to be working for us, but often it seems they are working for business interests or for the ‘sake of the economy’ – which may be true, but it’s not in our personal interests as workers. Like the employer, the government can’t be trusted with our interests when theirs are divergent.

Having a drop in our expectations might suit a government that wants more people to take up the less-pleasant jobs. The other option is getting employers to change their expectations. Employers are the people who give campaign money – who do you think will have to change their expectations?

Ok – another example. Think about the way people do their tax. No one pays more than they have to. Without checks and balances in the system people look for the thing that best suits them. If they can get away with something they will. Same for employers. Same for employees too, but the difference is the power inequity and the thing at issue. For employers it’s money, for employees it’s livelihood.

Ominous

I don’t know about you, but I trust most statements from scientists about climate change - more than I trust politicians and others with very clear motivations to tell another story - and I don’t see what they have to gain by lying. Let’s face it, global warming warnings don’t just come from one source. There are lots of scientists, in all sorts of different fields, who have been telling us for decades this is happening and that now we are reaching a point of no return.

It's them, not me

Ok, I do it a lot too, but it seems to me that we all spend too much time, particularly with climate change issues, saying ‘it’s them’.

Yes, large companies are doing great environmental damage and what’s worse is that they are lobbying against the world’s interests to prevent economic loss. They are attempting to mislead people. It’s the people who are allowing that to happen, though, isn’t it?

Are we all completely gullible fools or what? Perpetually making it someone else’s fault and therefore someone else’s problem is very easy.

We talk about ways of making more power without carbon emissions. Talk. It’s fairly certain that macro measures like solar and wind on our own homes won’t do it and if measured up on large scale, actually cost more. So much for the people who are trying to do something for themselves….

So, we keep talking about what we will do while the deadline passes. We shift the deadline – who can take something like a point of no return seriously?

There is never any serious attempt to re-educate the public. Never any talk of having to cut down and consume less, because this will piss of the people who make money out of these things. Why? Will it harm political contributions or the much-lauded economy?

Human civilization as we know it hasn’t been around that long. Before that we had equally acceptable ways of living. How many civilizations fell because they ignored environmental factors? Lots.

We can go on without the economy. We can’t go on without the environment and it’s time we took some personal responsibility.

On plastic surgery, plastic looks and Body Dysmorphic Disorder

Apparently a lot of us are suffering from BDD – Body Dysmorphic Disorder or ‘imagined ugliness’. Yes, there’s a disorder for everything, but in this case they are probably right as my first thought was, ‘well, in my case, it’s not imagined’.

Not surprisingly lots of people with this idea of themselves get plastic surgery and, oddly enough, there are high numbers of people who have had plastic surgery who later end up being a suicide statistic. How curious.

Not that I’m blaming the plastic surgery industry (now there’s a concept). I have had minor thoughts about ethics, but I understand the society I’m living in and I get that they are on the end of a long line of other money-grubbing, anti-ethical industries.

I mean, who would think that the images portrayed in the media would make us all feel that we should look like we are made of plastic or porcelain, to the point where people go out and try to achieve that impossibility and aren’t going to be happy with themselves ever? Who would think that?

Consequently, we have to waste a lot of time on research into these areas, when really, there are people starving.

I understand there’s real mental anguish going on – suffer quite a bit of that myself over not being perfect, but on the scale of things, this is less than nothing. In a world of poverty and war and environmental devastation on a planetary level, maybe we all need to think less about ourselves and get some sense of priority.

It would be nice if we could channel all the money that’s going to pay for golf carts into something useful and, really, if I decide I’m too ugly to live, at least it will take the weight of a Westerner off the back of the world.

Where would Australia be without food from other places?

My suburb is African in the way that ‘The Valley’ here used to be Chinese when my mother grew up there. There are lots of new Australians from Africa who live here.

I have to admit I don’t understand the cultures they come from. I don’t know what I’m doing if I smile at someone. (I’ve stopped doing that because you get some strange reactions.) Otherwise they are pretty much like everyone else and seem to be live-and-let-live.

What they bring to the area on the other hand is quite special – African Food is pretty much at the top of my best things list – the more African restaurants the better I say. There’s also colourfulness and a down-to-earth nature to the new shops.

I think we are going to do ok, if only the annoying people would just shut up. For some reason, they want to turn the African immigrants into this year’s political scapegoat.

Crazy-drunk-lady-on-the-bus (CDLOTB)

Crazy-drunk-lady-on-the-bus is a personality type, isn't it?

Anyway, CDLOTB gets on the bus and can't find a seat so exclaims about how rude and disrespectful men are to women these days. A young Asian guy (the fool) gives her his seat next to a pretty Asian girl. To her credit she sort of thanks him. Then she realises the girl next to her is Asian and says, "Where do you come from?" Young girl confronted with drunk, mumbly old woman doesn't really answer or understand maybe.... This causes CDLOTB to start….

She says she has worked since she was 8 and it's not fair that these people(being people who appear to have not been born here, I gather) come here and get given everything while she gets nothing.

I thought, hmm, that girl is probably a reasonably wealthy student whose parents are paying, through the nose, so that she can come here and get abused.

I wanted to ask if CDLOTB had asked for help, but I have something I'm deciding to call an 'inner British' who/which rightly says 'no, better to gracefully pretend it's not happening'. However, the lady from the refugee centre doesn't have any inner British about her at all - she decided to reasonably talk to CDLOTB, which anyone with an IB can tell you won't work. Thank you lady from the refugee centre.

Lots of swearing prompts the driver to tell CDLOTB that she will get thrown off the bus or the police will come for her, to which she replies that she has never sworn in her life and why would the police come for her because she's a good woman who's been treated badly. You can't actually argue with CDLOTB in any way.

And why would you want to, I think.

However, refugee lady having escaped the bus several stops before hers, two others decide to take up the gauntlet and cause another geyser of vitriol from CDLOTB.

Meanwhile I'm feeling sorry for everyone - the Asian girl who copped the CDLOTB, the fools who didn't know what they were causing with their well-intentioned, guilt prompted behaviour, the CDLOTB, certainly (while thinking ‘there but for the grace of god etc’) and mostly, mainly, me.

Freudian thought

I was vaguely thinking about somone who lives in a god-forsaken outer suburb on the other side of the river - and if you're from Brisbane you know we are divided more by the river than by economics - and my thought was:

I wonder how much a taxi would cost from their planet?

So I guess that reveals what I think about their suburb.