Hendification Blurs WorkChoices ll : Melbourne Indymedia

Hendification Blurs WorkChoices ll

Big business has a secret agenda to junk leave provisions remaining under WorkChoices.

Proposals to do away with entitlements to annual, sick, shift and bereavement leave were listed for a hush-hush get-together between the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) and Workplace Relations Minister, Kevin Andrews, on July 12.

ACCI boss, and former Peter Reith staffer, Peter Hendy, has denied the meeting took place but his agenda is clearly laid out in a leaked internal document.

It reveals that business wants Andrews to green light AWAs that supersede all minimum employment standards.

One ACCI constituent says most of its concerns would "be resolved if the government allowed AWAs to override the Standard".

Specifically, bosses are calling for:

- the ability to "completely cash out annual leave", effectively leaving Australians with no guaranteed annual leave at all

- the right to halve the WorkChoices entitlement to 10 days parental or sick leave a year through the use of take-it or leave-it AWAs

- a cap on entitlements to "paid compassionate leave".

- a block on the ability of NSW employees to utilise recently won casual conversion provisions. They describe the Secure Employment Test Case that delivered them as "draconian".

- get out provisions that would allow people to be employed for more than 38 hours a week without payment of overtime

- limitations on shift worker access to a fifth week of annual leave

The ACCI denial, co-signed by Hendy and Communications Director Brett Hogan, is illuminating.

It skites that "key measures" in government's WorkChoices package "directly accord with the policies of Australian employers, and are precisely the approaches we endorse as the way forward".

It denies employers had "sought to be able to have all annual leave cashed out" or "sought any changes to overtime pay, nor to change the 38 hour working week".

Yet each of those claims is outlined in a document that tells recipients they are "confidential items that ACCI will be raising with the Minister on 12 July 2006 in respect to potential amendments to the Workplace Relations Act".

ACTU secretary, Greg Combet, said the leaked documents were evidence the government planned another assault on working Australians.

In March, Finance Minister Nick Minchin told supporters at the HR Nicholls Society there was much for the government still to do on workplace reform, although he conceded, most Australians "most Australians violently disagree with what we are proposing".

We're not finished with workplace changes: Howard
David Humphries July 25, 2006

JUST as the bushfire over whether the Government is planning more radical industrial relations changes seemed to have died down, John Howard has rekindled the flames.

The acting Workplace Relations Minister, Philip Ruddock, said last week that John Howard made it clear there would be no change to the workplace relations law as overhauled in March.

But yesterday, Mr Howard said that more industrial relations reform was essential for a stronger economy.

"I want to tell you the Government has no intention of getting lazy or tired on the job when it comes to economic reform," he told a public meeting in regional Victoria.

"My responsibility as Prime Minister, the responsibility of all the ministers, the responsibility of the entire parliamentary team, is to make sure that everything that we have achieved economically is not only maintained but it is added to as the years go by.

"And we can only do that, we can only entrench and strengthen the economy further, if we're willing to undertake further reforms such as industrial relations reform."

As industrial relations emerges as the key battleground for the election due late next year, the Government has fumbled efforts to allay suspicion that its workplace reform agenda is a work in progress.

The Treasurer, Peter Costello, set the hares running last year with his suggestion that exemption from unfair dismissal law should extend to all employers, not just those with fewer than 100 workers.

In March, the Finance Minister, Nick Minchin, said the Government wanted an election mandate for "another wave of industrial relations reform".

He told an industrial relations reform lobby, the H.R. Nicholls Society, that there was still much to do in an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, workplace change process.

Senator Minchin thought his comments were confidential, and the Government publicly backed away from them. Presumably other ministers agreed with Senator Minchin's observation that the "great majority" of Australians "violently disagree" with changes already announced.

Last week, a document revealed that the country's biggest employer lobby was pressing for more changes. It showed that the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry met the Workplace Relations Minister, Kevin Andrews, on July 12 and asked for employers' rights to be extended.

That prompted Mr Ruddock to declare last week: "We will not be about fundamentally changing the arrangements we've put in place."

The Opposition Leader, Kim Beazley, said yesterday that Mr Howard was paving the way for "even more extreme" laws threatening holidays and the standard 38-hour week.

"John Howard is not finished with the Australian people yet," he said. "That's what the secret Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry agenda for Howard's Government was all about."

Yesterday, Mr Howard said advocacy of reform was never easy but its achievement was essential. "We can't rest on our laurels; we can't say … prosperity is here, it will go on forever, let's all take a holiday."

That would invite legitimate criticism, Mr Howard said.

If prosperity declined, Australians would ask the Government: "Why did they get tired, why did they get lazy on the job? Well, I want to tell you the Government has no intention of getting lazy or tired on the job when it comes to economic reform."

A World Away

Phil Doyle is pleased that a display of subtle beauty and athletic grace has been overtaken by some good old-fashioned mindless violence

A team carrying the hopes of millions, playing a long way away from home, up against some of the biggest names in the sport, ended up being cruelly crushed on the back of some hapless refereeing.

Yep, that was this year's State of Origin finale.

No one is ever going to catch an escalator up Everest, the Pope isn't going to appear on the cover of Penthouse, and Melbourne will never embrace rugby league.

Nonetheless, every year or two we go through this sad ritual where a rugby league test match or a state of origin is banged on for the bemused Mexican throng, with the NRL safe in the knowledge that ducks on a pond will draw a crowd in Melbourne.

This column actually played Rugby League in Melbourne and Adelaide and must report that it was a lonely, sobering experience; trooping out to far flung suburbs to play a handful of other sides in a competition riddled with expatriates from very limited parts of the world on makeshift grounds in a code that no one cared about.

Even after the Melbourne Shower arrived it has changed little. The extent of the junior code matters not a jot on the consciousness of the youth, while the senior equivalent battles on with a handful of clubs that seem to pop up like mushrooms, with the same longevity and form of sustenance of that irascible plant.

In Adelaide a decent deployment of Australian armed force personnel overseas could wipe out half the competition, popular as it is amongst those who swear fealty for queen and country. While clubs like the Geelong Tiger Snakes depend largely on the Kiwi Diaspora.

The only truly remarkable thing about league in the southern states, apart from how easy it is to get a run, is the striking South Australian state jumper - a gold red and black concoction that is at once stirring and psychadelic. The crow eaters done themselves proud there.

They can certainly hold their heads higher than their shabby treatment from the so called "top flight" rugby league which did a now you see it, now you don't routine - before being punted by Lachlan Murdoch as part of a peace deal that was successful in parts of the country where people care about muddied oafs.

Further east, there was some spurious strategic reason in keeping the Melbourne Shower in business.

The News Limited flagship is in running for the premiership, mainly on the back of Uncle Rupert's largesse. How long the Holt Street accountants keep propping up John Ribot's toy remains to be seen now that Murdoch the lesser, in a fair imitation of Henry VI, sinks from view amidst the gallantless parvenu that is News Limited.

This column once watched a person with a swipey ticket at Olympic Park stand there for three quarters of an hour at a turnstile, swiping the entry turnstile over and over again, in what must have been a mission to single-handedly break the attendance record. The next day the paper said there was 8,000 odd at the ground when there was probably closer to 500.

Melbournites care more for Morris Dancing than they do for Rugby League, which for them is a fascinating novelty, like the mardi gras or a car accident.

Not like in Katoomba, where the Devils charge for the semis has been noted. A recent win over the indigent profligates of Hawkesbury featured an astonishing effort that saw the ball volleyed through no less than three sets of feet, without touching the turf, before it landed on the chest of an accelerating centre, who went through a hole as wide as Sydney Heads to score. Thrilling stuff.

But even this toe poking effort was dwarfed by the eponymously named world cup, where an under performing England cheered everyone up (And proved the old maxim - a team of champions will give everyone the shits).

Aussies did proud and the hubris has been sensational. Proof in the pudding will come with the advent of this year's A League season, but if Dwight Yorke is back with Sydney FC then hopefully, the fact they have built it means the crowds will come.

Not like Fitzroy. For them the crowds were too often thin, and heartbroken, and surly, and drunk. Vulgar Press has produced a book of tales from my old lover, the fickle mistress that is the Fitzroy Football Club. Her turmoil and grace, and how we all felt that kick in the cods in '96 (which seems like a very long time ago full of startling fresh pain).

I am still too heartbroken to read about it, but if you are an uncaring misanthrope, or revel in melancholy, the details are here.

Luckily there is the happy mindless violence of country rugby league to lose myself in; otherwise this sporting life would be too beautiful to stand.

Phil Doyle - getting a little sideways as he tries to pass in the chicane

PS - Thanks to those who appreciated June's sports column, the best apparently.