Excellent point in a very well written piece. Work-Life Balance should be our aim, a healthy workforce is a productive workforce - no question.

But Vanstone's own whinging about "she complains that normal Australians seem to have developed a reputation as "whingers", at least in their attitudes toward parliamentarians." Maybe because we have genuine complaints about our leaders, or lack there of. Purhaps if any parlimentarians are reading this they should take a good long hard look at themselves before crying 'Nobody loves me'. The public are sick of the mud slinging, anything to win 'no matter the cost' politics that Australia is being subjected to at the moment. I would say that if they cleaned up their act we would have a lot less complaints about their antics.

Yes it was great for a morning chuckle. One of the comments I liked was 'La Dolce Vita in Rome hey Amanda. Whats stop whingeing in Italian ?.'

"Amanda Vanstone Has Had Just About Enough of Your Bullsh1t

Someone at Fairfax needs to be taught the difference between an opinion piece and the baffling meanderings of someone in a sh1tty mood. "

http://abafflingordeal.com/2013/01/07/amanda-vanstone-is-pretty-annoyed-with-you/

It wasn't the best of the day though, I liked the one about feral cat haters being racists...

'The feral cat looks perilously like a metaphor for the universal unwanted asylum seeker and migrant'

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/hatred-of-feral-cats-hides-a-sinister-truth-20130107-2ccqu.html#ixzz2HWr0YOGR

We all know there are lies, damn lies & statistics.

Academics write most of the stuff, so know just how much bull is used in compiling, & how often they are used to hide, rather than illuminate the truth. So when an academic, or in this case an apprentice academic, starts spouting statistics you have a pretty good idea they are using them to support some argument, that is unsupportable with actual facts.

Statistics are all too often used to pull the wool over unsuspecting eyes, just as has been done here. The left are particularly good at making blindfolds out of words on a screen.

No consideration is given to our falling productivity, & our growing inability to compete in this world. No, just a look at the time clock, as if that has much to do with work undertaken, & completed in a given time.

Even our last remaining large industry employer, the mining industry is feeling the effects of poor productivity, but when you look at our really large employers, federal, state, & local government bureaucracies, & academia, we find a truly horrifying lack of productivity.

So sorry Russell, merely stating the number of hours in the building won't hack it in the real world. That is really academic, in the scheme of things. Perhaps if folk actually worked a bit more of the time in the building, they could go home earlier.

If only hasBeen.

You work harder, you get more work to do.

The hours are set in stone, and the deadlines are based on unpaid overtime.

I am most productive working from say about 4PM to 10PM at night. I could easily get a whole 'day' of work done that way, without all the distractions. My boss would rather have the warm and fuzzy feeling that I'm there in 'business hours', just in case, even though we only speak once a week or so.

The bosses create the lack of productivity by their short shortsightedness. They'll be damned if they will let people work their own hours, or in their pajamas at home, even if their work is of superior quality and quantity that way. They simple don't trust them, and they actually prefer a facade of bums on seats rather than widgets produced.

So what could be a win-win, ends up a lose lose, all because of the adversarial attitude exhibited by the likes of Vandstone here.

In the original article Amanda Vanstone says, "The answer is simple. Just do not look to the parliament as an example what is good in Australia."

Which is precisely the problem...

Let's do a deal. We'll all stop whingeing as soon as we can say,

'The answer is simple. Just look to the parliament as an example what is good in Australia.'

I'm not holding my breath and in the meantime I'll look for a feral cat to kick in the guts.

The author says:

"According to official OECD statistics, Australians have among the strongest work ethics of all the developed economies. In 2011, each worker worked an average of 1,693 hours (or 32.5 hours per week), which is more than workers in Britain, Sweden, Ireland, France, Norway, Germany and the Netherlands"

The myth of the overburdened Australian toiling ever-longer hours has overtaken the myth of idle the idle Aussie in the “land of the long weekend” that it was crafted to supplant. Both are wrong. Australians do not work exceptionally long or exceptionally short hours by OECD standards, we are about in the middle of the pack – working fewer hours than Britain Sweden etc. but more hours than the USA, Italy, New Zealand, Japan and Canada. In 2011, Australia’s average annual hours worked of 1,693 was about 5% less than the average across the OECD of 1,774 hours:

http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=ANHRS

And, the long-term trend is for average hours worked to decline, not for us to work “ever longer” hours:

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/latestmf/1393.0~5

Comparing Vanstone’s rather bland and formulaic conservative homage to the hard work of ordinary folk with the imprisonment of absconding workers in the 1830s takes the art of drawing a long bow to a whole new level.

And no employer group I know of argues that we must adopt Asian wages and working conditions in order to compete. We compete on productivity, not unit costs.

It's quite true, as Rhian points out, that no employer group argues that we must adopt Asian wages and working conditions in order to compete. It's merely that while Australian wages and working conditions remain above those in the Prison Republic of China important sponsors of the Opposition are not happy. Work Choices was all about reducing that gap to be more "internationally competitive".

The Labor Government has been a mild and unreliable impediment to the transfer of remuneration from those who produce the goods to those who profit from them. Hence the near frenzy, which has reduced parliament to probably its worst level of behaviour in history, with trumped up scandal after trumped up scandal over the last couple of years to get rid of the government not at the scheduled election time, not now, but YESTERDAY. Former Work Choices Minister Peter Reith has recently been quite outspoken about why (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/industrial-relations/make-ir-an-election-focus-says-peter-reith/story-fn59noo3-1226142154475).

EmperorJulian

Ah, of course, it’s a conspiracy! Businesses might say they want skilled, productive, well-paid employees (after all, they make the best customers as well as the best workers). But what they really want is miserable impoverished wages slaves earning $20 for a 50-hour week. And the Coalition is determined to give it to them!

The evidence for this being - Peter Reith’s nostalgia for WorkChoices (under which, incidentally, real average weekly earnings in Australia rose, while average weekly hours worked fell).

And the government that tried it on got dumped so decisively that its leader lost his blue-ribbon seat, and the two following leaders of whose party have busted a gut trying to convince the electorate they wouldn't dream of trying it again. But still the takers dream of getting a bigger slice of the company income at the expense of those whose production earns it, and they urgently want a government they can rely on to deliver it to them. Hence the endless muckraking making the parliament a bad joke

EmperorJulian

I agree that Workchoices was unpopular, and that unpopularity was a significant factor in the defeat of the Howard government.

That’s not the same, however, as contending that the opposition intends to drive down Australian wages and raise hours to match China.

My point is that there is neither direct nor indirect evidence for this claim. It is not in any of the arguments for deregulation propounded by government or business groups, and it is the opposite of what actually happened after Workchoices was introduced.

In fact, during the whole post-war era, there has only been one period which saw either a sustained and significant decrease in real wages, or a sustained and significant increase in average hours worked – and that was under the Hawke-Keating Labor governments of the 1980s and early 1990s. The reasons for that are interesting, but a whole other story.

If the Liberals really do have a secret agenda to drive down wages and raise working hours, I’m happy to report they have a 100% failure rate.

That's an issue I have with the majority of these articles, they always need to turn it into a binary proposition, praise workers/scorn employers.

Similarly, the Union movement has never turned from being combative over the decades. Case in point, look to the recent stupidity with the MUA and automatic ship loaders. The apparatchik in the Union movement must have seen it coming but instead of years ago working with business to discover ways they could set up manufacturing industry here to make the loaders and then export them to the ports in SE Asia, their answer is to try and find a way to stop them and somehow halt progress. Now Patricks will import the auto loaders from Finland. Capital will always be used to replace high wages where it can, that's a good thing, it improves productivity.

Deregulating the labour market DOES NOT EQUAL LOWERING WAGES except as a clarion call by myopic Unions. It should be seen as a good thing and yet many, including the author, see it as nothing more than a race to the bottom rather then a way to help increase productivity, benefiting the nation. We don't need more regulation, that just equates to more regulators, more HR Staff, more lawyers all of these people increase GDP, make the current account worse, lower productivity and make it harder to compete on an already competitive international stage.

Good article, sound and well argued.

Re Hasbeen comment

The fact that statistics and data can be distorted doesn't mean they arn't essential. Your argument seems to be that since something can be mistreated, anyone using that something must be mistreating it. You provide no argument at all, you just ridicule a person based on their profession.

You just want people to donate their labour to their employer you crazy man. Workers, like employers, are not charities. How have you got time to be writing this, shouldn't you be working overtime for free?

Quote from Rhian:

"And no employer group I know of argues that we must adopt Asian wages and working conditions in order to compete".

They would if they could Rhian, and they did when they were allowed to. If not for unions and laws, we'd all be slaves. Don't be so ridiculous as to suggest otherwise. They were draged kicking and screaming into a world of social justice, and without constant vigilence they would regress in an instant, Vanstones comment to wit

And the government that tried it on got dumped so decisively that its leader lost his blue-ribbon seat,
Emperor Julian,
You, as is typical for Labor supporters conveniently failed to mention that the afore-mentioned was solely due & only possible because of the massive numbers in the Public Service. Were there an integrity-based system which only permitted wealth creators rather than wealth takers to vote it would have never happened.

Tellall

The problem with your argument is that it is totally impervious to reason or evidence. If you won’t accept either people’s stated objectives or their actions as evidence of their motives, then you are free to populate their heads with whatever you fancy, however baseless.

I could with equal validity (i.e. none) claim that you “really” want to kick puppies to death, even though you may never have said as much, or kicked so much as a single canine.

Rhian

But I do accept peoples actions as evidence of their motives.

Those actions are happening all over the world, right now, and history is full of those actions. Are you blind, deaf and dumb?

Of course they don't state their true intentions, because those intentions are to reduce wages and conditions. They prove that by their actions.

Question: if a completely deregulated labour market increases wages, why are employers arguing for it? Are you expecting us to believe that employers want to pay higher wages?