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Issue No. 143 05 July 2002  
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
 Lessons from Air Disaster
 Buggering the Bush
 The Great Giveaway
 Down and Out
 Why I hate Telstra
WHAT YOU CAN DO
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Review

How Not To Get It Together

By Tara de Boehmler

Together is a belated reminder that it takes more than high ideals and the right intentions to turn a commune into a community.

**********

Has inflated rental costs got you leafing through the share housing classifieds? Do you secretly long for the uncomplicated communal utopias enshrined in hippy folklore? Do you plan to audition for the third series of Big Brother?

In the hippy era there was a book that you could read before deciding whether communal living was for you. Clem Gorman's People Together: A Guide To Communal Living summarized a few important tips about forming a successful communal household, what to keep in mind when relating to each other and contained a handy chapter on relating to society.

These days Lukas Moodysson's new movie Together carries many of the same messages by depicting what happens when a group of society drop-outs choose communal living for some very different reasons and even less understanding of where each other is coming from.

One of the residents of the Together household invites his sister and her two young children to come and join the commune, after her alcoholic husband physically abuses her.

The entrance of the woman and her children into the household sends the other housemates reeling.

Before, the idea of community was just something they spoke about. But now they are faced with the reality that some sacrifices may need to be made to accommodate this young family.

Seeing the household through the children's eyes quickly reveals some of the darker undercurrents within the housemates' personalities.

Their motivations, methods of manipulation and less than desirable character traits are unsympathetically exposed and their reasons for rejecting bourgeois society for this dysfunctional little unit begin to look more ridiculous by the minute.

Unfortunately the movie falls down in its pigeonholing of different personality types through the use of one dimensional extremes. It also fails to recognise much that was good about the hippy era's passion for communal living.

This is a movie that should be seen by activists who fail to act, community leaders who refuse to play a role in their community and anyone who talks hot air then disappears when crunch time comes.

But if you are looking for a misty-eyed trip down memory lane, Together will do little to recapture the genuine feelings of camaraderie and community that really did exist in much of hippydom.

2 out of 5 (the art of falling apart together)


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