It was hypocracy of the grandest order.Firstly Labor screams murder with the dismantling of the Commwealth employment service,then Kevin Rudd says how evil the entire IR reform is and it must be elimated,all the while his wife gets very rich on tax payers money running an employment service based in the two "evils"that Labor professes to abhorr.

To add insult to the injury of our intelligence,Kevin says his wife is not an appendage,then gets her to sell off a lucrative part of her Aussie business so he can be a pausible Prime Minister.Therese has been left with no illusions about who owns the appendage and who weilds the real power.

I think they are both fools why sell a 150 million dollar business to put up with this sort of sh!t?
Or sell the business and tell em to stick the PM job and put their collective feet up.
The interest on that @ 5% is $7.5 mil
Gee I could just squeeze by on that and a medicare card.
You wonder why you don't decent people in politics
A Who would want to put up with this sh!t.
B Most of you are incapable of recognising a good person if you fell over them and even you would give them a good kick on the way past.
C Its a rare person who would survive without being an @rsehole
D Why go into a job with good intentions then get the living sh!t kicked out of you

I don't have a problem with the Union Movement having so much influence within the ALP; after all the Australian Labor Party was founded by the Union Movement and Conservatives are represented by the well heeled entreprenuerial classes,wannabe capitalists and neo cons
What irks Unionists is the continuing shift to the right by the ALP in order to appease swinging voters and the continuing erosion of Workers Conditions they achieve when in power,i.e. the Accords under Hawke that achieved what the Liberals could not.

The first post by Wre also strikes a (dis) chord when it so happens that an aspiring Prime Minister's spouse benefits from the privatisation of the Commonwealth Employment Service by obtaining contracts from Government; Surely a potential conflict of interest.

The Howard Government's actions during the last term has soured the electorate regardless of his economic management with a flourishing resources boom through his Union bashing IR laws; illegal participation in Iraq war; disgraceful immigration policies; Shameful Foreign Policies with AWB, Free Trade Agreements which impoverish Australian enterprises in his rush to get on the Globalisation wagon, and reprehensible refusal to act for David Hicks.

I will be voting the Howard Government out at the next election and I will be watching Rudd with interest and not a lot of confidence unless he is reined in by his Party.

When the issue of underpayment was made public it was also reported that the matter had already been rectified; workers were reimbursed for the wages/salaries lost. If my understanding is true, then it has been a storm in a tea cup and it should be the end of the matter.

Perhaps more focus needs to be on the Liberal Party where a Federal Police Raid has occured on Liberal Party Headquaters in Queensland.

the grownups argue over the dinner table, about who gets to carry the family credit card. the kids huddle in their bedroom, whispering about their chances for a visit to waterworld.

that's the level of political culture in australian 'democracy'.

meanwhile, the water pipes only deliver a rusty dribble, the price of electricity is skyrocketing, and the 6 o clock news announces that daddy has heard of something called global warming but won't pay it any attention because his knitwear shop would suffer, if it were true.

Frank/ Chain Smoker…

It seems to me that you failed to respond to any of the points I made with the exception of the the funding issue.

At the end of the day, the ALP and unions are inextricably linked. The unions expect the ALP to be their mouth piece and they also expect their agendas to be pushed- these agendas have less to do with supporting the working man than maintaining physical control over every construction site, port and mine in the country for the benefit of the union bosses. How anybody can sit back after the recent recordings that have been aired and assert that unions are a ‘good’ thing is beyond me. Furthermore, even if the unions only fund 25% of the ALP, it is still a massive chunk (which doesn’t take into account indirect contributions).

Rudd is a conservative christian wrapped in ALP cloaks. As the union bosses have kept telling us, he is not a grub, thug or picket line enforcer like them. However, the unions are smart enough to know that they need him to win the next election- it is blatantly obvious that once he wins, he will be expected to push the envelope of the unions. In my view, he is not a strong enough leader to be able to withstand that pressure, especially that from his MP’s.