Gee am I reading this right, you want work choices back? If you had spent more time saying what the problem is and how the government can fix it, then this may have been a worth while read. Right now I want my 5 mins back.

Sounds like Gary wants to dictate rather than talk.

Rudd certainly “lives on another planet” and perhaps the only step that needs to be taken is for Labor to dump him as leader. No matter what people think of Tony Abbott, most admit he is an action man; Rudd is a gobbledegook man, looking more inept and silly every day.

On the matter of our undoubted richness in natural resources, Rudd seems intent on leaving them in the ground in order to comply with green world government and its carbon scam. That he is so different in every way from Howard, Hawke and Keating in everything (there was a similarity of approach to the economy and industrial relations from those three, despite different ideologies) indicates that he is not particularly driven by any political tenets, but by his own eccentric beliefs that he has something to offer as Rudd the individual. He has nothing but crap!

The author’s:” The Rudd government has no language and no insight into economics” overlooks the fact that there are a couple of Ministers in the Rudd Government who might have such insights; it is Rudd himself who has no language or economic insights. Were he to go, or at least stop his micro-managerial meddling in things he is ignorant of, some expertise might be released. However, Rudd being Never-wrong Rudd, kicking him out would be the best bet if Labor is to convince us that they can repair what the man has done, and start doing what a government is supposed to do.

Gary Johns wrote, "The significance of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in this industrial relations agenda was to turn Australia from the land of the long weekend into the land of the engaged worker."

Thank you for reminding us who to largely thank for the fact that Australian workers work longer hours, including unpaid overtime than anyone else in the developed world.

Instead of achieving the promise held out in the 1960's and 1970's of greater leisure hours, we instead have arrived at circumstances where not one, but two bread-winners often find it necessary to work evenings and weekends, in order to pay rent, the mortgage and, in general, to make ends meet.

The article is seems to argue for the resurrection in some form of John Howard's odious "Work Choices".

It laments the failure of the Rudd Government to implement further 'reforms' in the interests of Australia's corporations, but fails to take account of the fact that Rudd was elected in the first place, because people had had a gutfull of Howard's 'reforms'.

I think Australians should rightly be appalled at the record of the Rudd Government. They have elevated incompetence to a fine art form. Huge amounts of taxpayer's funds have been squandered and we now find ourselves indebted again, all to supposedly 'stimulate' Australia's moribund economy dependent upon property speculation, digging massive holes in the ground and changing beds of foreign guests in hotels.

Rudd and Swan crow about how they have supposedly saved Australia from the worst ravages of the GFC by giving us all back some of our own money to buy plasma TV's and throwing away more of our money on so many incompetently managed government programs, but all they really did was buy us a small amount of time whilst avoiding confronting the problem at its source.

And to buy that small amount of time, they have taken away from us a range of choices that we might otherwise have had.

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The first that come to mind was when Queensland Premier Bligh announced the $15 billion fire sale in May 2009 and the Federal Government said they had no spare money to help Queensland out of its financial difficulties.

Last Sunday, Joe Hockey brazenly resurrected his dream to privatise Medibank Private, citing the need to raise $3.5 billion to pay for Rudd's debt. Paying off debt is also going to be (once again) a convenient ready-made excuse for more slash-and-burn budgets should the coalition win office this year.

Wouldn't Australian's have rather had those choices put to them before the Rudd Government threw away all our money?

I get the sense now, whether or not that is Rudd's conscious intention, we are being set up by this Government to be savagely punished by the next Government in the a way were set up by Keating, prior to the 1996 elections, after which Howard 'discovered' a big budgetary black hole that could only possibly be fixed by the budgetary axe and fire sales of assets.

The fact that, this time, Hockey feels confident enough to state his intention more openly than Howard did prior to the 1996 elections should be cause for great concern.

On top of all this, Rudd has of course, compounded our problems by maintaining record high immigration for no coherent logical reason that he has been prepared to divulge to the Australian public.

--

James Sinnamon
Brisbane Independent
for Truth, Democracy,
the Environment and
Economic Justice

Australian Federal Elections, 2010

No worries Kev has it all sorted with progamatic specificity,or is it sper-sper-specifmissity.Oh I give up! Miss a somethinks or sumthing.Kev has me all confused.I feel I'm being used.

If we are the largest this and that in terms of minerals and energy,then why are so many,working long,hard hours for so little?