E D I T O R I A L

Bad Bosses
It could only come from Tony Abbott: an impassioned defence of bad bosses that manages to dismisses the experience of every worker who has ever been done over at work.

F E A T U R E S

Interview: Media Magnet
Labor's communications spokesman Lindsay Tanner on Telstra, pay TV, Murdoch and Packer and other media dilemmas.

Bad Boss: Abbott's Heroes
The first nominee in our Bad Boss quest is a man who runs his call centre as though it were a primary school classroom.

Technology: All in the Family
LaborNET's tentacles continue to spread with this week's launch of the New Zealand Council of Trade Union's site.

International: New Labour's Cracks
The British labour movement has plunged itself into another round of tit-for-tat insults flying between the Blair Government and the trade unions, reports Andrew Casey.

Economics: Virtuality Check
Is the Internet Bill Gates' guide to wealth and power or the key to liberation from alienation and corporate power? A new book weighs the arguments.

History: Necessary Utopias
Neale Towart looks at the impact of the Robens Report to argue that worker control of industry is where OHS should be heading.

Poetry: Let Me Bring Love
The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, the Honourable Tony Abbott, has made an offer that the Australian worker will find hard to resist: 'where there is hatred, let me bring love'.

Review: How Not To Get It Together
Together is a belated reminder that it takes more than high ideals and the right intentions to turn a commune into a community.

Satire: NZ, UK Added to Australia�s Migration Zone
In an effort to increase support for its plan to remove 30,000 islands from the Australian migration exclusion zone, the federal government has added New Zealand and England to the list of excluded islands.

N E W S

Revealed: The Evidence Cole Won�t Touch

Search for Bad Bosses Begins

WorkCover to Set Up Crimes Unit

Electricians Oppose Family-Busting Conditions

Blue-Collar Blokes Back Mat Leave

Murdoch Telegraphs Contracts Push

Abbot Changes Rules for �Employer Advocate�

Gucci's Label Tarnished

Funding Cuts Drives Academics Mad

Star City Casino Strike On The Cards

Chifley Planners Lose Benefits

Qantas Staff Sick of Shivering

Regional Councils Call Jobs Summit

Kiwi Ex-Pats Targeted for Poll Push

Shangri-La Workers Still Fighting

Korean Unionist Freed

Activists Notebook

C O L U M N S

The Soapbox
The Bush Telegraph
Telstra�s poor performance in the bush is not just about reception, argues the CEPU's Ian McCarthy

The Locker Room
The Tennis Racket
You would think that child labour would have gone the way of bus conductors and public telephones that work, but this is not necessarily the case, writes Phil Doyle.

Bosswatch
Capitalism in Crisis
The collapse of a US telco has sent shockwaves around the globe and undermined trust in a system that rewards hype and dishonesty.

Week in Review
Between the Sheets
This column is heartily sick of being called solid, reliable and old-fashioned so Jim Marr gets with the program and discovers this is, in fact, an up-and-down, in-and-out sort of world�

L E T T E R S

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The Bush Telegraph

*****************

The cynical announcement by Telstra that they will allocate $187 million to upgrade rural telecommunications services is nothing more than a cheap stunt to give the impression that the carrier was doing something positive prior to further privatisation says the telecommunications union CEPU.

The publicity stunt was simply a re-announcement of monies that the carrier had already allocated and is woefully inadequate to make any real difference to rural performance which had suffered at the hands of the Coalition.

Privatisation works like this.

Take a world class telecommunications carrier whose performance is so good those developing countries want to know how they get service like that into their remote areas. You see they can not go to the USA for help because the telecommunications network is in private hands and that in the land of the free enterprise if you can't pay for the service, you don't get it.

Now sack a swag of staff and start contracting out as much work as possible (even if it is cheaper to do the work in house) so that the financial markets prick up their ears at the sound of your number crunching.

Throw a tranche of shares into the market like burley and watch the waters bubble and froth.

A problem now starts to emerge in that all that cost cutting is now starting to bite and the rural punters are beginning to agitate about delays in service and escalating costs. Regional MPs start pestering the Communications Minister about what to tell their constituents who smell a rat. Surely privatisation was going to produce a stampede of private telecommunications companies who would kill to get their products out to the bush and give Telstra a bit of ginger.

Perhaps it's time to hold an inquiry so that we can prove that those phone delays in the country are just an issue of perception. Surely Telstra can produce some statistics to show that service has actually improved and that sure in a number of isolated cases they were delays but we can't help that can we?

With the inquiry out of the way and the rural folk scratching their head and wondering,....... "was it just their imagination after all?", its time for the Government to turn their attention to a few Independent MP's who might swing their vote if the price is right. After all the Nats will do as they're told.

Time to knock a few thousand more jobs out of the company to show the financial markets how butch you are and hope like buggery that the rural voters don't get too riled and send those irritating Nats around again to bother the Minister who is busily baiting hooks.

Now is the time to launch the real bait over the side of the boat and see how the fish are biting.

Gadzooks! They've gorged on burley from the first float and their not so eager to bite this time. The catch is down and the investors are starting to smell something fishy as the share price starts to slide to the bottom faster than Tom Cruise's last movie.

So now we're starting to get the picture. Almost half the show is sold and the Government starts to run the line that you can't be half private and half public. It's like being half pissed; all good sense starts to abandon you faster than Johdi left Jamie (only for a lot less money).

Time to go for broke so now we pitch a few pennies at the rural punters, perhaps when they see a few Telstra trucks zooming around their country lanes they'll relax long enough so that we can sell the remaining lump of Telstra.

Problem! With the share price at rock bottom we're gunna have to offer a bit more than a set of steak knives to sweeten the deal. Hey! How about a free mobile phone with every share parcel. Sweet!

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Last Modified: 15 Nov 2005