Sometimes I have wondered what she was like when she was younger. For example, the fresh freckled faced girl aged 16, just out of school, boiling water for cups of tea in the accountants’ office in Townsville. Apparently it was Sir Artie Fadden’s old firm and the retired politician would sometimes drop in, flag his hat, and ask “how are you girlies?” to what we would now call the support staff.
In thinking about the value of work, it is difficult to know where to begin. The diversity of work, the varying significance it has for different individuals and communities is a basic and obvious point. Cole Porter playfully alludes to some of the meanings of work in a song he composed, ‘Her Heart Was In Her Work’
Sooner or later it had to be faced. The unintended consequences of the operations of the Industrial Relations Reform Act preoccupied the minister, Mr Brereton, for some months. Last Monday he acknowledged that “the unfair dismissal provisions of the new act have been the subject of a great deal of exaggeration, misrepresentation and scaremongering”. This was not part of the script.
The International Labour Organisation may be suffering a crisis of relevance but this is not halting the procession to Geneva.
In the aftermath of the Victorian State election in 1992, the election of a conservative administration and the enactment of new State labour laws, momentum gathered within the labour movement to utilise ILO Conventions as a means of striking down the Victorian laws.
Employee share benefit arrangements were one of the casualties of this year’s federal Budget. The government proclaimed that it would stamp out tax avoidance arrangements posing as employee share arrangements. Some doctors and other types were cited as typical rorters.
Co-written with Tom Forrest, Economics and Labour Relations Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, June 1994, pp. 117-136. Another version of this paper appeared under the same title in Jim Hagan & Andrew Wells, editors, Industrial Relations in Australia and Japan, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards [Sydney], 1994, pp. 153-164.
The Australian government, like the rest of the world, will one day have to make up its mind about Taiwan. But first, the Taiwanese need to decide things for themselves, including their ambiguous legacy and relationship to China. Is Taiwan a province of China? Or should Taiwan become an independent country? That is a decision that might be made by the end of this decade.
The numbers are probably against any change in policy. But that should not stop public consideration of what this year’s ALP national conference, to be held in September, should decide about uranium mining.
In the past few years there has been increasing speculation in Australia as to whether large corporate mutual, typically in the insurance and superannuation fields, should consider demutualising.