Possibly, Rudd is a believer in a soul-deadening puritanical Christianity. One struggles through this vale of tears with an eye on the afterlife in which one will be rewarded for not having lived the real one.

I think that people who are "workaholics" basically suffer from an unrecognised mental illness. Either that or they have very empty and boring lives outside of their work. Hopefully one day a cure can be found.

"Rudd is a believer in a soul-deadening puritanical Christianity"
Hehe I can see him whipping his own back until it bleeds with the branch of a gum tree. Although his soul was revived for a short time in that infamous US strip club.

"One struggles through this vale of tears with an eye on the afterlife in which one will be rewarded for not having lived the real one."
He is going to be soooo disappointed.

Heh. A good article and so true. It seems to me over the past generation or so Australian society has gone mad - we've gone from a situation where a single average income earned from a 40-hour working week was sufficient to sustain a typical family in reasonable comfort, to one where ordinary workers are working ever longer hours, and often two incomes aren't apparently sufficient.

Where does all the money go? Answer: on purchasing oversized houses stuffed with too many consumer goods, on unsustainable motor vehicles, or pissed up against the wall or gambled away as people seek to relieve the stress and alienation caused by their insane lives. Slightly exaggerated of course - but you know what I mean.

All of it gobbles up finite resources and social capital at exponentially increasing rates, and it will probably be a blessing of sorts when the crunch hits as AGW and resource depletion really begin to bite. There is much to be said for 'downshifting' as an alternative to the lunacy of the contemporary rat race - in our case, we did so by choice and circumstance nearly a decade ago now, and we haven't looked back :)

This very American work practice of demanding workers toil for more than 8 hours a day without paying overtime is immoral, it just makes the robber barons [oops employers] richer. The growth in company profits has outstripped the growth in hours of work which has outstripped the growth in wages.

Rudd should get a life beyond being Mr Prime Minister and allow public servants to have a life also. You can see people who work long hours are visibly more tired and I remember when Department of Social Security was rolling out a computer system the department demanded long hours of work with workers travelling all around Australia for 2 years. The upshot was that most employees ended up divorced.

Interesting that public-sevants need to quote from the real/workers experience's of the past.

Where were they when howard put blue collar workers onto contacts?

when we got gst?
when they sold telicom?

please quote how much civil-servants work?
40 hours?
38 hours?
30 hours?

How much their pay has gone up while the dumb working/class-slob has barely had 30 percent increase in his takehome pay over the last 12 years.

I understand civil-servants have this thing called flexi-time
[work as you feel ?]
[or as is needed ?]

what gets worked gets made up on the swings and roundabouts

I didnt notice the posters complaining about howard work-choices ,
yet here is one public-servant worked through one night
and the liberal bloggers are on to it big time>

no doudt the sellout docter is making a point about in in the 'house'[of cards] as i type.

And the sold-out liberal media ?
that wants the libs back next election?
are on top of it too [R U suprised?]

Where where you when howard gave high definition to the people instead of multi-channeling ?

The problem isnt that some poor public-servant had to work till dawn, but its that they are expected to work at all

[look their super is in the bank]

[while the poor working-slobs super just got reduced one third via the stock collaps

[the same market our COMPULSORY-super props , up with its weekly COMPULSORY cash top up ]

lets look at public-servants generouse super contributions shall we?

poor bloomin them

They get their paid for cars with their subsidised meals ,and their fuel vouchers, and petrol cards ,free travel
poor bloody them

They dont give a stuff about service
how much they get rent assistance?
poor bloody them

To who much is given
a bit of effort is to be expected

What about our poor sole-diers ,doing battle because public servants just said ok to flawed intel?
[because they are spoiled rotton]

Having nothing better to do than leak documents to the liberal media adjenda ,to write letters to the editor or to blog

Public servants work much longer hours now than in the days of the inefficient public service of the 70s and 80s.

CJ and billie are spot on. We are constantly told we are better off - but by whose definition? We now cannot live without two incomes, we are working longer and longer hours, eating more fast food, getting fattter, institutionalising our children and spending less time with family.

Kevin Rudd may think that being a workaholic is admirable but is it? Can we trust a person who is at risk of illness, is overtired and stressed while making vital decisions on our behalf? This is different to having a strong work ethic that allows for some commonsense rationing of time.

As a detractor of WorkChoices Mr Rudd should know that work-life balance is paramount for the well being of a nation. Public servants are workers too and have families. Some areas are severely understaffed and expected to produce more while budget cuts don't allow for recruitment.

Like most Australians public servants saw the election of Rudd a bit like the coming of the 'Messiah' - new broom they thought, no more cowering under the hard line and anti-dissent of the Howard regime' and maybe now there might be some attention to social justice and environmental issues. Well it is still early days but already there is some room for improvement.

Rudd makes a big mistake in being too much like the previous government and has to remember they were voted OUT for a reason.

If Rudd wants to make positive changes to the APS he would be better off reviewing some of the Howard political appointments of the senior public service. Some Deputy Secretaries and senior consultants often from the ranks of Liberal ministerial staff and consultants.

Rudd would be better focussed on reviewing national security arrangements (via an external review). National security agencies and departments need a good shake up, a review of the use of funding arrangements and duplication of functions - basically to rid of the empire builders.

Many of them should have been sacked for deporting and locking up Australians, not reading cables, fitting up "terror" suspects and sundry other crimes.

This hysteria based on one statement by Rudd is an absurd debate and not worth the time that has been wasted on it.

So many of those public servants have done nothing for so long that they should suck it up or resign.

Marilyn,

So you are happy to condemn hundreds of thousands of public servants for the actions of a few. A few that were highly politicised under the last government. Your bias is showing.

If you were to inflict this biased judgement on blue collar workers you would be shouted down in the streets.

Public servants are sucking it in and getting on with it but it doesn't mean that it is fair nor a desirable benchmark for other Australian workers. Or is work/life balance only relevant for a select group of workers of your choosing.

Kevin Rudd is thrashing around like a man possessed.He asks for reports and takes weeks to read them.How can one man assimilate so much information?

If he,after yrs of being in the PS and Govt cannot hone in the central issues,then he should not be PM.This man is all image.He is too obsessed just preening it,rather than tackling the important issues.He leaves Peter Garrett to explain why they will not back solar innovation here.Total hypocracy!Sign Kyoto but do not upset the coal industry.

Marilyn, generally I support the direction - if not always the vitriol - of your opinions.

However, in this case I think you're way off the mark. Do you actually know any public servants (I mean, other than your combatants)?

I'm not one, but over the years I've known and dealt with more than a few. They vary greatly.

Whatever the case, neither they nor any other Australian workers should be forced to work the utterly insane hours that have latterly become the norm. Surely you'd agree with that?

It has amazed me for years that those professing to be the most intellectual and clever nation not to mention richest nations on earth havent been able to figure out how to have a four to five hour working day for everyone. Even if they have one peron working four hours of a morning and one person working four hours of and afternoon to keep the shops and buisnesses open for eight to nine hours daily.

If all workers were content to only receive the wages associated with this then the market would have to adjust back down to a level where workers could spend lower incomes. As you can see when households have two incomes the market just adjusts upwards to eventually swallow the extra money earned.

I think maybe some at the top like the idea of having two big incomes to take off the workers.

Not so clever, clever country.

Shhhhh. Dont give away the ultimate point of the game, else, they'll be too much competition for leisure space and not enoigh people to do all the work that creates that space in the first place.

A buddhist monk who lives on alms alone, requires the toil of those who toil, so that he may be free of it all.

Dont ever forget, that its the hard working souls like rudd, who are thoroughly committed to themselves thru the mechanism of society, that create the leisurely spaces one moves thru.

Its a bit like jumping the queue when getting onto a freeway entrance. The fact that the majority stay in line, creates the opportunity for the queue jumpers.

If everyone jumped the queue, it would be chaos, a place where leisurely sloth just cannot exost.

Thanks rudd. Keep up the 'work' old boy.

ps. the likes of rudd, have in fact never really done a days 'work' in their life. As a former pen pusher, l can attest to the fact that, if l can go to work in $1000 worth of clothing, then l aint working.

The article "Consumerism – an Historical Perspective" (2004 - http://homepage.mac.com/herinst/sbeder/consumerism.html) by Professor Sharon Beder(http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/author.asp?id=4202 http://homepage.mac.com/herinst/sbeder/home.html) may be of interest. She shows how in the 1920's when there was a prospect of working hours being reduced as a consequence of rising productivity, US corporate leaders deliberately set about, with advertising campaigns, to increase the material wants of workers so that they would prefer higher wages to shorter working hours. As Beder wrote in the concluding paragraph:

"The desire to consume is often portrayed as a natural human
characteristic that cannot be changed. However it is clear that
populations have been manipulated into being avaricious consumers.
What people really want, more than the multitude of goods on offer,
is status and history has shown that the determinants of status can
change. If we want to live in an ecologically sustainable society,
then we need to award status to those who are happy with a basic
level of comfort rather than those who accumulate possessions. If,
as a community, we admired wisdom above wealth and compassion and
cooperation above competition, we would be well on the way to
undermining the motivation to consume."

Good points cacofonix.

The so called 'skills shortage' could easily be alleviated by reducing the demand for goods (goods we don't really need) and reducing our population.

Our obsession with immediacy or immediate gratification has also reduced our leisure time - the obscure need to be contactable and available 24/7 gratis mobile phones, blackberries and other technologies. :)

Thanks pelican,

I agree with you on all points.

However, I don't actually think that all the newer technologies are inherently bad, although I question the necessity of many.

The fact that we have less, rather than more leisure time and less material wealth in an objective sense(*), indicates to me that someone other than ourselves has appropriated the benefits of these technologies and/or that there must be truly staggering inefficiencies in our supposedly wonderful free-market economic system.

---

* As an example, I don't consider that if a family can now afford to buy a second car and pay for all of its running costs, that their material advantage over a family of a generation ago that could only afford a single car necessarily fully matches the additional income that has allowed them to buy that extra car. This is because it has become a necessity rather than a choice.

These families can actually be viewed as worse off, if in spite of being able to own an extra car, it takes more, rather than less effort for them to make all their necessary journeys through our crowded, congested and poorly designed cities than it did for an equivalent family with only one car a generation ago.

Similarly, a family who can afford to buy an elaborate home security system that was not necessary a generation ago is not truly better off materially even though most of today's 'free market' economists would insist that they are.

An article, "Living standards and our material prosperity" of 6 September 2007 which discusses this, is to be found at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6326&page=0