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Issue No. 255 | 11 March 2005 |
A Skillful Ruse
Interview: Dot.Com Workplace: Dirt Cheap Industrial: Daddy Doesn�t Live With Us Anymore Economics: Who's Afraid of the BCA? International: From the Wreckage Politics: Infrastructure Blues History: Meat and Three Veg Savings: Super Seduction Politics: Popping the 'E-Word' Poetry: To Know Somebody Review: Off the Rails
Three Dollars Free For Readers
The Soapbox The Locker Room New Matilda Parliament Postcard
Banks Are Great
Labor Council of NSW |
Tool Shed Let Them Eat Yellowcake
***** Howard favourite Hugh Morgan, who earns more picking his nose than most of us earn in a week, has shared his unique intellect with us all in his role as the grand pooh-bah of the Business Council of Australia. Hugh's union, the Business Council of Australia, represents the big end of town. It likes to crow that its members employ a million Australian workers. It's not so forthcoming about its plans to pay them all in salt. Yes, the man who puts ugh in Hugh, the founding member of those warm and fuzzy guys at the HR Nicholls Society, is the same guy who, as Ian West MLC recently reminded us, "described the original living wage judgement as leading Australian society down to 'catastrophic collision with rural bankruptcy, sudden South American style devaluations, international insolvency and grave social dislocation'." Well, our economic genius of a Tool certainly got that right, didn't he! For our Tool Of the Week, slashing wages and conditions, creating a working poor and sending Australian living standards off to the third world are part and parcel of "having a vibrant, adaptive, changing competitive economy". No doubt it's a lot more vibrant now that his old company, Western Mining, is throwing uranium around the place like confetti. So vibrant it's a wonder it doesn't glow in the dark. Despite being a Reserve Bank Board honcho, Hugh finds time between awarding the interest rate rises that were never going to happen under Howard to hang out with such fun loving organisations as the Lavoisier group. The Lavoisier group are a bunch of crackpots running around encouraging a head in the sand attitude to the future - if we say there is no problem then there is no problem, especially with inconvenient little problems like the greenhouse effect. Hugh showed his hand when he lauded them as visionaries: "We learn from government agencies and their economic modellers that greenhouse policies may cost us upwards of $12 billion per annum in emission charges. This equates to the economic impact of another GST. And yet we had an election and several years of public debate about the consequences of introducing a GST---contrast this with greenhouse policies." And.... "Industry faces significant costs to meet our proposed greenhouse gas emission reductions---$100 million for WMC and over $1 billion for BHP. On this basis alone, we have a self-interest and, indeed, a moral imperative to be involved in the greenhouse debate." What an amazing thought process that can argue that self-interest occupies a moral high ground! Environmentalism, Morgan says, is the main threat to western civilisation. Who needs an environment when you've got an air-conditioner, eh Hugh? Hugh points out that increasing amounts of carbon dioxide are good for us. Well it's good to know that Hugh doesn't want science to get in the way of making a buck. In fact Hugh doesn't want anything to get in the way of making a buck, especially restrictive work practices such as paying employees or not killing them. Since Howard got his hands on the nation's title deeds the BCA has been lusting after the prospect of taking Australia back to the nineteenth century and the glory days of the masters and Servants Act. Or better still, the Stone Age, where it can be a straight up survival of the fittest. They are the economic equivalent of the raincoat brigade in an x r*ted cinema! "We have for the first time in 30 years a Government that isn't compromised through lack of control of the Senate and expectations of moving forward the reform agenda are, quite naturally, high. There's a measured sense of urgency, given that it's not long before you enter another election round." Yes, Hugh's Fourth Reich will be of limited tenure, not because Australian's continuing to support Howard is a bit like a turkey voting for Christmas, but because of the terrible restrictions that democracy places on genii like Hugh. If it wasn't for Democracy Hugh would be able to have the sort of ordered structured fascist dictatorship he craves so dearly. Given his generous spirit that he shares with his fellow Australians, is it any wonder that Morgan has been charged with with genocide!
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