Your wasting your time rehctub, these lefty bureaucratic types will never understand.

My exchange components business in Sydney employed 26 people, but from Christmas eve to Easter I struggled to have enough in the bank to pay myself as much as either of the apprentices, due to staff annual holidays, & public holidays in those first 4 months each year. I simply had to make enough in the rest of the year to cover that period. Tough luck if I couldn't.

On a Whitsundays resort island I was paid $130 a week, working 10 hours a day, 6 days & more a week, & loved it. I was not quite as generous as a handsome young German there. He once said, "I would pay $500 a week just to be allowed to work here. He had worked very hard & made a lot of money at Mount Isa mines.

On one occasion in the off season, with only 6 house guests, my lady on similar money, was waitress, kitchen hand, office manager, housemaid, boat hostess, with a little barmaiding as well. She started at 7.30, & finished at 9.30, with a 2.5 hour break in there somewhere. Of course we liked the owner, who was struggling.

The whole pay system is out of control. On one hand a huge number of workers can not possibly earn their cost, at award wages, for the employer. On the other hand, in most of the country no family could live on one average award wage alone.

In the 60s I could pay a mortgage, & keep my wife, daughter, & the Repco Brabham, on about the average wage. Today I would be able to afford only one of the 4, unless I robbed a bank. Of course I paid only 7.25% tax back then, so the answer is right there.

Get rid of 75% of the bureaucrats, & strip the system of most government paid entitlements. Then tell people to manage on their own, with the extra after tax money. Some may then actually embrace that dirty word, WORK.

Can someone clear something up for me here, from a much earlier post; my understanding, from when I was an employer, was if Christmas day fell on a Sunday the following Monday was a holiday in lieu. This means you were paid for the Monday, but not the Sunday, one day not two.

As an aside; my son, in Australia, just had three air conditioners installed. They had to use 'qualified' tradesmen to do the installations and electrical. The three units took one and a bit days to install, (mainly because of smokoes and lunch), and cost around two grand in labour charges.

I had two installed in Bali, it took the guy an hour each, and he charged 600,000 rupiah for the two, ($60). The electrician did quite a bit of other work, including wiring them in, and charged a bit less.

Butch; "Just on the $68K, i wouldnt get out of bed for that amount", that just about sums you up.being happy to see children and others illegally exploited in the work place, but wouldn't get out of bed for $68,000 p/a yourself. Let others be the judge. You must be a very good businessman, can't say the same for 'Breadline' Hassy.

Billyd, if my full time employees are rostered on to work Sundays, and Christmas day falls on sunday, then you have to pay them because you must pay a minimum 38hr each week unless you have a fortnightly roster. So essentially i paid two extra public holidays, even though i earned nothing myself as i was closed. Its a joke.

Paul, if you employ someone and pay them say $68K per year, and they dont make you $68K in profit, why would you employ them?

Like it or not, there are very few out there who actually set out to creat jobs, they just happen and the larger companies are doing their level best to replace staff with machines.

The trouble is too many employees think they are entitled to their job, as if it's their 'given right' to work. Well it's not, they are simply lucky to have someone willing to take risks with the bi product of that risk being jobs.
In the past twenty odd years we have seen a huge transition from full time work to casual, even contract work, all because people kept wanting more and more. Keep pushing and those jobs will vanish. Then what?