
Issue No 74		20 October 2000

LaborNET	Ask Neale	Tool of the Week

Tool Shed

How To Win Girls And Destroy Your Father

A Workers Online first. We have a father-son tool combination in successive weeks. This week Paul Reith cuddles up to his motormouth dad who is still barricaded in the toolshed.

To each according to his needs, from each according to his Ministerial connections seems to be the motto of the Adelaide-Melbourne establishments - a blue blood version of socialism, financed, of course, by you know who.

The ReithCard plot thickened this week when the daughter of a wealthy, Rolls-Royce driving Adelaide doctor fessed up to being the Miss X in the investigation (the third or the fifth?) into how 11,000 calls, from Kooyong to Singapore to Helsinki were made on our Minister For Destroying Workplace Relations' phonecard.

Spunky Ingrid Odgers - see page three of Thursday's Daily Terror, pretty well all of page three - raised the ante when she charged out of anonymity after Reith Senior, the self righteous one, started tossing the word fraudulent around. (Hope that house Hudson Conway flicked him ain't made of glass!)

Ingrid stuck to her guns and repeated her version of events - that Paul Reith had given her the pin number for the card and told her to use it whenever she liked. This is, by a long way, a more plausible explanation than anything the dual tool team has come up with. i.e. A hotel worker nicked it. (That would be Tool Senior - blame a worker.) Or she stole it. (Out of his brain? The X-file explanation.)

Ingrid also came up with another pearler.

'When I lived in the house with Paul Reith he would always show off. At one stage he said he wanted to get his father's private jet to fly him and me back to Adelaide for my 21st,' Ingrid tells us.

Tool Junior was only 20 at the time and Ingrid, well Ingrid looks like Ingrid, so this gem of evidence has a ring of authenticity about it too.

Since this story broke in the Canberra Times early last week Tool Senior has rolled out every trick in his repertoire - dissembling, obfuscation, fudging and outright lying. From the beginning he's treated all Australians like they were a pack of mugs as he tried to talk his way out of the wreckage. It has been a week of peek-a-boo for the Australian public into a very nasty psyche the trade union movement knows only too well.

There is one salient fact in this whole affair that should have been enough for him to lose his ministerial head immediately. He broke the guidelines and probably the law by giving the card details to his son in the first place. What followed is irony and theatre.

This slow, agonizing political death is exactly what Reith deserves.

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Issue 74 contents

Interview: Politics Italian Style
Italian journalist's union official Rodolfo Falvo talks to Peter Lewis about Italy's Rupert Murdoch and why Italian politics is so crazy.

Unions: A Partnership That Works
Students at Williamstown High in Victoria are benefiting from a creative partnership with TAFE and the Electrical Trades Union. Kevin Peoples reports.

International: Fiji Paymasters Fill Their Own Pockets
The Interim Administration imposed on the people of Fiji, as a result of the coup-makers, have voted themselves a hefty pay increase at the same time as they demand public sector workers take a twelve per cent pay cut.

Politics: USA Campaign 2000 - On the Road
Michael Gadiel reports on the thrills, spills, highs and lows of the US Presidential Election.

Women: Party Girl
'You can take the girl out of the Port, but you can't take the Port out of the girl' - Stephanie Key recounts her life as a feminist in a male bastion, the Transport Workers Union.

Satire: Telstra to issue $50,000 Reith Phonecard
CANBERRA, Monday: Telstra have announced Peter Reith-themed phonecard. The phonecard allows friends and family to make $50,000 worth of phone calls on it before you receive a bill. Plus, you only have to pay the bill in total if there is sufficient public outrage, otherwise the card costs just $950.

Review: Health, Wealth and Mutual Obligations
Mutual obligation for the poor only, increasing income inequality and a widening health gap. Welcome to the 21st century -or is it the 19th?

» Bitter Dispute Ends With Joyful Tidings

» Bodgy Telemarketers Face Union Wrath

» Another Bastard Bank On Rampage

» Employers Reject Individual Contracts

» Time To Come Clean

» Child Care Workers Tell Kim How Howard Nicked Their Money

» Reith Must Apologise Say Hotel Workers

» Telstra Too Smart On Casuals

» Primed To Win

» Payday Nightmare Follows AFFA Outsourcing

» Palestinian Community Seeks Union Support

» Trade Union Choir Rocks Town Hall

» WorkCover Goes For Gold In Paralympics