Well said Steve,
But the next thing to watch out for will be when many Contractors, who are working as defacto employees, realise that there is something the Tax Office calls "Personal Services Income".

This means the ATO will treat them as employees and virtually all of their new-found Tax Deductions will cease to exist.

Dear Billie
you said:

[where long hours were demanded my personal experience was that long hours caused personal relationships to suffer and made women choose between career or children]

and for the words 'long hours' could be substituted with 'resource' such and such, and 'women' with 'society'.

Our fundamental capitalistic approach to industry is such that it will exploit and expend, then move on to the next thing or person to consume.

I realize its not a monolithic unified economic approach. There are people out there with a more tempered approach, who try to balance the gouging of both human and natural resources with the needs to have relationships and not eat yourself out of a living, but......

...there are sufficient out there who DON'T... they just see the opportunities in a Machievellian/Sartre'an manner and view all things human and natural in a utilitarian way and bow before the evil galactic war Lord named 'Shareholder Value' and his equally evil henchmen/sub gods of 'CEO BONUS'

Its nice when Bill Gates declares he will give 95% of his wealth to 'Charity'....but my Bible says "When you give, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, don't sound a trumpet before you like the hypocrites do, that they might gain the praises of men, they have their reward"

The cynical me, is kind of wondering if Bills 'Charity' is something like "Providing Computers and software to 3rd world countries" which in effect is just Microsoft marketing by proxy. I'll await news.

A doctrinal Socialism is equally bankrupt. I don't think there is any social/economic 'system' which can be codified which will solve the desire for overall welfare and that of individual freedom to achieve.

I'd prefer that we lived in both our stewardship of the planet and people in simple a "Love God first" and "Do for your neighbour as you would have them do for you" manner.

Of course we have a few Jihadists and North Korea's to 'Tame' first :) because they only want 'Their way' or the Highway.

Okay, BOAZ_David.

So if Bill Gates mentions he is giving money to charity, he's blowing a sinful trumpet? If he did not mention it, then people would condemn him for not doing so.

Besides, it's arguably better for business giants to improve image through charity than through yet another advertising campaign.

Current U.S. mininum wage = $OZ 6-43/hr
Current OZ minimum wage =$12-30/hr
Current account deficit =$500,000,000,000
An American minimum wage earner toils for 11 hours to fill the average petrol tank.
The bane of all subcontractors is getting paid on time. In my experience, 30 day accounts are a rarty as businesses regurlarly stretch payments out to 120 or 150 days or in some cases never.
It is only a matter of time before these conditions are forced on all contractors.I wonder if the banks or credit card companies will forego repayments for up to 5 months while I wait for the cheque thats in the mail. Business have a habit of using sub contractors as banks as they pay no interest on what they owe subcontractors.

There should be a code of conduct for both the employer and the employee.Unfair dismissal was a disincentive to employ people and it had to go.We need to exclude our parisitical legal system from all manner relationships in our lives since they just play one side off against the other to maximise their own bottom line.Our present legal system is destroying our social and economic fabric.

AWA's are really unnecessary for ordinary workers and they do give the employer the edge.Just make it easier to fire unsatisfactory workers including pollies and public servants.

The push is on to lower wages since we cannot compete with Asia's boundless cheap labour.Our balance of payments deficit is accelerating and we will eventually become insolvent as a nation because we virtually have no manufacturing,our existing industries in mineral and energy resources are being acquired by Multi-nationals and the share market thrives on the sweat of the poor.If people cannot afford to buy basic commodities that they produce,then we have poverty traps from which they cannot escape.

There is no choice,we either reduce wages to that of third world countries with all the crime and social problems of an uneducated population,or we slow down the rate at which we are removing tarrifsand even select certain industries to protect like Europe does.We seem to be the only nation on this planet that protects none of it's industries.Where is the level playing field?

There is no doubt that many workers in this country need to smarten up their act but we should use less stick and more carrot. Your wealth is in your people and if you treat them like curs,in a law of the jungle environment we will have both a devalued population and economy.

The Coalition is rapidly losing support but the alternatives are absymal.It is time for a new political force not aligned to union cronyism or multi-national power and greed.There still is a strong ethic in Australia for "The fair go" for all and John Howard had better take heed.Woe is us,the electorate.

Shonga said that the average annual income is $53000 but he knows very few people who earn over that. perhaps that's because the Australian Tax Office says the mean adult income is $26,000. The average is calculated by totalling all income then dividing by the number of incomes totalled. The mean is calculated by ranking all incomes from highest to lowest then finding the person in the middle and determining their income.

Plersis: why do you assume that if we have an equitable society with a social safety net that all Australians will live at subsistence level? Kenneth Davidson said that the latest OECD study had shown that collective bargaining and providing retraining assistance to the unemployed worked successfully in Austria, Denmark, Netherlands and Ireland. In fact talking of Ireland that was set up in 1923 as a peasants republic and as a result there was fearful poverty, I can remember seeing ragged skinny people scouring rubbish bins in Dublin in July 1976, prior to Thatcher there were no homeless in London. As a result of government tax breaks for IT, Ireland now exports IT software and software developers to the world.

BOAZ_David : So what’s the IR legislation got to do with hours worked? IMHO workers who don’t conform to employer expectations are penalised and I like the scandanavian attitude of building a civil society. Opponents point to the high tax regimes in Scandanavia, but newsflash, when you add in the additional private health insurance and superannuation payments middle-high income Australians contribute the Swedes pay less for more aged pension and health care. Scandanavians they are concerned about using only what they need and not squandering resources. Australian 16 [old] square homes are considered wasteful by Danes.