Struggle Street

This is a picture of the Bankstown demonstration over industrial relations late last month. Thirty thousand people marched through the streets in a largely good natured display of opposition to the new industrial relations laws. More than 150,000 people marched in demonstrations around the country. The march in Melbourne was 80,000 plus. Hey hey, hoh hoh, Johnny Howard's Got to Go. Placards, t-shirts declaring the wearer to be "working class". I was amazed by the size of the demonstration, that surreal feeling as I emerged from a taxi into the marching throng.

Mind you, many of the teachers and government employees had been given the morning off to participate; so I guess it's easier to protest when you are being paid for it. Maybe the impact of the new laws is starting to bite - the government was trailing Labor by six percentage points in the last Newspoll. But somehow I can't get my head around who is right and who is wrong. Basically it seems a good idea to get the government off our backs and out of our lives; but that leaves everybody exposed to the untrammelled greed of giant corporations. And who as an individual can possibly sit down with their employer and negotiate terms which suit them best when you are dealing with some of the country's and the world's most ruthless organisations?
Once I would have automatically regarded Howard's actions in bringing in the new laws as outrageous, and backed Labor 100%.

But there have been too many excesses from the left; and I'm left confused as to what and whom to believe. Labor has promised they will abolish the new laws immediately they come into government. That has immediately put them offside with big business. Most people I know regard the laws as Dickensian, a brutal assault on the working conditions of employees.

The laws, regularly described as "extreme" by the Labor opposition, appear to have wiped out a hundred years of union activity just like that. They have unsettled a lot of people, not just the chattering classes. The Howard battlers that have been so important to him, particularly here in the western suburbs of Sydney where a number of longterm Labor seats have fallen to the conservatives. I just don't know where I stand on the whole issue. The industrial relation laws were a quagmire and the industrial relations commissions the usual left wing enclaves of pompous overpaid idiots running around pretending to be defending the working classes. But many people feel uncertain about the new laws; which basically encourage workers and employers to reach their own agreements. People are trading away holidays, leave loading, over time payments. There's been a string of hostile stories: the woman who refused to sign an Australian Workplace Agreement - AWA - because she would be fined $200 if she reported in sick without 12 hours notice; people having to pay for interviews.

The counter-argument is that it will encourage enterprise and commercial activity and actually lead to an improvement in working conditions. I doubt it very much. The trouble is, I've been so very wrong about so many things before. So, the long and the short of it is, I don't know where I stand on the issue. My instinct is against; my brain says wait and see. I'm just glad I've bought a bolt hole in the country and can disappear at a time of my own choosing.

QUOTE:

"The currents here are labrynthine, a morass of competing flows that dissipate the impurities in convoluted chains, taste-trails that make little sense, little pockets of different dirts.

"They are hard to follow.

"The whales are dead."

The Scar, China Melville.

NEWS:

BBC:

More than 60 people have been killed in Lebanon since Israel launched its offensive four days ago, sparked by the capture of two of their soldiers by the Hezbollah movement. Militants in Lebanon continue to fire rockets across the border into Israel.

INDEPENDENT:

Beirut - Israel kept up its blistering offensive against Lebanon Saturday after Hezbollah guerrilla leader Hassan Nasrallah defiantly declared open war in a conflict that appears to be spiralling dangerously out of control despite international calls for restraint. Lebanon failed at an emergency UN Security Council debate to secure any action for a ceasefire to halt Israel's fiercest assault on its neighbour in a decade, underscoring rifts among world powers over how to handle the crisis. Combat jets bombarded Lebanon in a series of dawn raids, slamming missiles into bridges and petrol stations and killing four people on the fourth day of fighting that has so far claimed the lives of at least 90 people on both sides.