The minute they die or are placed into a home, up goes the 'For Sale' sign, with the adult children flying around to clear the home and erect a 'Garage Sale' sign.

For ten or twenty years one does not see the elderly's adult kids for dust!

The market, government and Australians all decide upon wages earned.

Carer wages are a disgraceful situation that needs rectifying.

Hi Folks.. wonderful to see some very positive and informative opinion here.

Pericles..I'm promoting you :)

CLOWARD PLIVEN/STORM unfolding before your eyes.

As I write now, we see a number of countries in various (but critical) stages of the subheading above.

What are they?

CLOWARD PLIVEN is a revolutionary strategy aimed at bringing down capitalism by overloading the social welfare system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy

Of course..in good communist fashion they don't speak of 'revolution' no..they speak of "A strategy to end poverty".

The key is 'overwhelming demands for social welfare by ORGanizing the poor... and ensuring every benefit available is taken up. The objective is to create a social crisis through which there will be a guaranteed national income (wealth redistribution)

This is 'soft' communism.

Now for the HARD version.

STORM
http://media.glennbeck.com/downloads/10/06/STORMSummation.pdf

Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM)

This works in harmony with the Cloward Pliven strategy and we see the following countries in different stages.

GREECE and FRANCE are the furthest down the track with widespread violence from communist agitators stirring up unhappy public service employees who have had benefits slashed due to running out of money

UK has only reached the 'widespread discontent' stage..the violence will come soon.(Unions are at the forefront of this.)

Notice how it went

a) Demand HUGE public service.
b) Demand HUGE public service BENEFITS and pensions.
c) When the financial crisis comes.. DEMAND the government be ousted.

USA The USA is furthest behind, with only 'talk' of cuts and an election in November. THEN the Unions will take to the streets under the guidance of the booklet "storm"

AUSTRALIA ? notice the public service demo's in South Australia ?

we are unique
Yes the support for carers is minimal and their efforts save governments a lot in terms of institutionalised care.

Rudy
I agree retail staff are only paid about $16-$17/hr - I was trying to be as even-handed as possible with a comparison between the minimum wage and the lower end of a CEO wage, but you are right $25/hr is not near the minimum.

Nairbe and Pericles make excellent points about the distortion in education. The distortion is not real given the standards have dropped to create the illusion that the University Degree is a minimum requirement. It should never have been so, the tiered structure is a much better and workable system. Trade education was poorly neglected for years and in some ways still continues to be underrated.

individual
Your experience in the public service matches mine. Too many blowhards and paper shufflers and not enough people on the ground doing the actual service delivery. Trying to improve the situation is a waste of time and is usually the death knell for any career aspirations.

Anytime there is a move to cut the budget it is nearly always at the bottom end and very rarely do we hear the words "yes we can find some efficiencies within the senior management team". There has been a gradual creep of payrates in the APS where now jobs that were performed by APS5/6 are now performed at the EL1 level while the frontline lower level APS employees become more separated from the administrative end, their very real pressures in dealing with real people and high pressure situations often highly underrated. Add to that cuts in the field/frontline and the problems are exacerbated.

Salaries within the APS overall are bloated and don't reflect the real world and it is one of the only organisations where I would argue for a review of salary creep as well as at the top end of town.

Apologies Al, for digressing a bit on your topic, but individual's words struck a cord.

No problem Pelly... I'm 'tolerant' :) specially of fair dinkum people like you.

I hope you can look at the big picture here though... it is happening..it is serious..and there is a 'plan' which is being worked to.

All the micro stuff you are focussing on at the moment is very important at the individual level...I agree, but something bigger is afoot.

FRANCE. the country is 'buggered' to be blunt with over spending.. and for the life of me I cannot work out where these 'millions' literally in the streets think money is going to come from to prop up the spending which is clearly unsustainable.

Anyone have any clue ? I'd really like to know.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=4044#100624

pelican, i agree with much of what you have said in all your comments here but you last sentence was way wrong.

The land of OZ between 1945 & 1965, had fantastic, "Worlds Best Practice" trade education systems. We produced some of the best trades"Men" anywhere. It was destroyed in the 80's by Comrades Hawke & Keating along with education for Doctors & Nurses. Some more damage was done again in the mid to late 90's by both sides of politics, federal & state, but the real damage was by the 80's reforming ALP.