Duplo Rudd

After watching this interview (Windows Media, Real Player) on ABC’s Insiders, I’m wondering whether Kevin Rudd is styling himself after the little Lego men I used to play with as a kid (ah Lego – hours of fun). His hair is so incredibly shiny and plastic looking!

Unfortunately, my opinion of the Ruddster, Gillard and Labor in general has slipped even further since my last post. I’m disappointed with their “Forward with Fairness” Industrial Relations policy. If they win government, Labor will scrap Australian Workplace Agreements (individual contracts introduced by the current government), preferring a collective bargaining model. They’ll ditch the Australian Industrial Relations Commission and a bunch of other related bodies, replacing them with a new all-powerful IR referee called Fair Work Australia (or “FWA”, as in “Unions rule, FWAHAhahahahaaaa!”). This is not a forward looking policy at all. In fact, it’s a giant step backwards. I’m not against some protections for low paid workers, but this policy goes a lot further than that. Labor’s got to come up with a more realistic model. And it it has to be a model that doesn’t protect workers at the expense of the unemployed (or, to put it another way, a system that doesn’t protect the working class at the expense of the poor). In the past, keeping the unemployed out of work was one of the nasty side-effects of heavy union involvement in the workplace. Just because Australia has a low rate of unemployment now, does not mean it will stay that way.