"How Rudd’s pink batts saved Australia"

This author wrote that!?

What a disgrace. The mentality [sic] of the left is a atrocious.

I've been saying much the same thing the author has for a while - especially on OLO.

However, I disagree that this is a Tory thing. The relentless assault on worker rights is a 100% bipartisan phenomenon - as the 'centre' for all political parties moves further and further right. It's also taking place in much the same toxic manner throughout all Western nations.

The process has been operating under the Western media radar for about 30 years, but has accelerated significantly over the last 5-10 years.

The media's role is not only to amplify the propaganda that 'we can no longer afford' to protect worker rights or to maintain a social welfare system, but to also distract us from seeing how those rights and social protections are being dismantled.

People on the supposed left have been conditioned to get passionately upset about an environmental threat somewhere or a human rights abuse in some faraway country. However, careful non-reporting or under-reporting of the continual assaults on our worker rights and welfare system ensure that we have little to nothing to react to. Witness the complete lack of response to the Treasurer's recent announcement that raising the retirement age to 70 is virtually a 'given' in the May budget or the complete non-debate surrounding the groundswell of zero-contract labour and unpaid internships.

Judy
Your comments reek of objectivity, how dare you claim such a right. From where I sit on the fence I suspect you may well be of the right persuasion. There are others who also make this claim and they know beyond all dispute that if anybody makes comment with which they fail to agree or indeed even understand, such a commenter must be left.

Its a bit ironic that much of Australia's current economic and social mess can be traced back to the Hawke\Keating regime which de-regulated and dismantled Australia's economic safeguards.

Those amongst us who believe they are right might well have voted for H+K had they known that they were actually right when many naively believed they were left.
Den 71

Killarney,
great to find others start to see the game that's played and how our government acts entirely in the interests of big business - deflecting, distracting. and duping its populace to comply with one theft after another.

For 30 years, a deliberate campaign has been conducted to dismantle the foundations of a decent society, to erode hard fought for gains, to sell every public asset, to remove every legal impediment to oligopolies, to eviscerate unions, prohibit strikes and protests. Where ever you look from welfare, to education, from workers rights to small business rights the entire country has been surrendered to oligopolies.

We forget that we agreed to this movement initially because there would be this trickle down economic dividend - but that never eventuated. The economic rationalist solution to our 1970s stagnation has now revealed itself to be fraudulent - built entirely on debt and increasing inflation the system is broken. But for the hi tech boom we would have arrived at this impasse much sooner.

The mega Corporate version of capitalism, the current global hegemony has arrived at a dead end. The vibrancy of capitalism comes from innovative, small businesses who grow as older big businesses fail and disappear. But in this current hegemony the mega corporates prevent entry in entire fields of business and the few who successfully avoid their border control are simply purchased absorbed or bullied into submission.

All the while, what passes as progressive or resistance is absorbed with random victims, identity politics, never ending arguments about racism, sexism, violence to women. Indeed anything and everything to divide and distract.

Yebiga

That about sums it up. Unfortunately the Australian people appear to be caught up in the same web of ignorance, hypocrisy and obedience so well described by Julian Ninio in his telling book about the American empire. Thankyou for taking the trouble to comment.
Den71

From what we know of Lefties and what we have seen of their current activities, the aim is the creation of a pool of unemployables or people in insecure employment, who are not protected by work. As they will be easy to please, these "Elites" from their Ivory Towers will create a vast sea of expendable foot soldiers for their political ambitions.

Bosses and workers are on the same side, it is only the "Elites" and other parasites who benefit from un/under employment.