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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Between the Sheets

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

International leaders have been infamously randy for generations. British and European monarchs were putting it about centuries before JFK and Bill Clinton were ever heard of. But Gareth Evans and Cheryl Kernot? Gulp, that's a bit close to home.

Seems that when Cheryl led the Democrats and Evans was a Labor Cabinet Minister they were not only respectively married but consumating cross party alliances in a very personal manner.

It all came to light while Kernot was promoting her book, Speaking For Myself Again, which railed against her treatment after joining the Labor Party but, somewhat unwisely, omitted a central element in her conversion.

Questions are now being asked about a leaked email which claims Evans admitted to lying to Parliament over the affair.

...............

Allegations of worker-boss adultery and sex by a western Sydney rubbish dump rocked the Cole Royal Commission into the Building and Construction Industry until Sammy Manna thought better of them and issued a humbling mea culpa.

Manna went back onto the stand and told the Commissioner he had fabricated stories of illicit sex with an employer who had claimed that he, in his capacity as a union organiser, had threatened her and her children. Manna, apparently, was so incensed by what he regarded as outrageous libels that he invented the sex claims by way of retribution. Having thought about the potential damage to the woman's reputation and family, he recanted and now faces the prospect of being prosecuted for perjury, an offence carrying a five-year jail term.

The CFMEU, while understanding Manna's frustation at the unsubstantiated allegations he faced, has rejected his original response, insisting he will have to meet any resulting legal costs from his own pocket.

................

Sports people and entertainment types get caught up in domestic problems more than most as John McEnroe probably remembered just after former wife Tatum O'Neal returned one of his volleys with a stinging forehand passing shot that caused most observers to mutter - game, set, match Miss O'Neal.

Reinforcing the fact that people in glass houses should never, ever, write books, McEnroe served it up to his former wife in his appropriately-titled memoir, You Cannot Be Serious.

Deadly serious, O'Neal returned with interest, revealing McEnroe had been on steroids, as well as recreational drugs, during his tantrum-soaked days as enfant terrible of the tennis world.

......................

Then, presumably to make sure there was no hanky panky afoot in the war-ravaged valleys of Afghanistan, the US launched a pre-emptive strike against a wedding party in the Kandahar region.

Witnesses claimed 40 people, including 25 from one family, had been killed and "some 100" others wounded. Many of the wounded were later interviewed at Mirwais Hospital in Kandahar.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not coincidentally, the 40 Afghan revellers were killed as the US mounted a major diplomatic offensive against the new World Criminal Court which it argued might prosecute troops engaged in peace keeping missions.

Analysts called the Bush bluff, pointing out the court was a lot more likely to investigate US troops carrying out aggressive actions, such as those in Afghanistan, than those serving as peacekeepers under UN auspices.

Still, according to prevailing journalistic wisdoms, that's all much less interesting and important than what happens in the bedrooms of politicians, celebrities and people they meet along the way.

.......................

All of which brings us to the big issue - anyone with evidence of George Bush picadillos, involving humans of either gender, or even small furry animals, should mail them to someone who is interested.

Normal service resumes next week, promise!

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Last Modified: 15 Nov 2005