Ho Bloody Ho

A vision of things to come was provided for us in New Zealand this week, with the Singaporean Government using security guards to belt a few union organisers in Palmerston North. The union folk were trying to get a better redundancy deal for some call centre workers whose jobs are flying off to Manila for the duration. When the ACTU described call centres as the "sweat shops of the 21st Century" they weren't kidding. In a time honoured fashion plod has decided to charge the union organiser for repeatedly headbutting a security guard's fist. A fan of this sort of harmonious social interaction between labour and capital, Mr Peter Hendy, has packed his comb-over and left the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry - where he did such a sterling job defending WorkChoices with such success at the recent elections - and has gone onto the staff of the obviously doomed Dr Brendan Nelson. The good Doctor appears intent on surrounding himself with intellectual and social winners in much the same way that General George Custer surrounded himself with the 7th Cavalry at Little Big Horn. Why Nelson would plumb for such a Capital L Loser as his chief of staff is anyone's guess - perhaps no one else wanted such a poisoned chalice. Meanwhile, back in the real world, we slouch towards Bethlehem and K Mart as the annual festival of consumption rattles apace. I am avoiding Sydney until this whole thing blows over as I have reports of how that whited sepulchre is descending into a hell hole of third world proportions. It appears, from reports, to be suffering from an epidemic of 'Freedman's Disease' - a condition named after the frontman for the band The Whitlams - symptoms include a vastly exaggerated sense of self importance, a propensity for impotent violence, and a vacuous worshipping of of middle class banality. A town where creativity is competition and the nearest thing to a soul is on the bottom of your shoe is best avoided. After all, the next big thing planned is the post Christmas sales, where mild mannered people claw and scratch at each other to get hold of 'stuff'. It makes cargo cult riots in Papua New Guinea seem mild by comparison. We live in dark days indeed. The one redeeming feature was confirmation this week of something I had hitherto suspected for some time - this report from the delectable Annalee Newitz reveals that humans are not much smarter than dogs or monkeys. I believe that monkeys are probably, and dogs certainly, a lot smarter; as any witnessing of a post Christmas sale will evidence. The blog that never sleeps will be continuing to spew forth right through the festering season. These are the last days, and someone needs to keep these clowns accountable.

The Full Nelson

If ever you wanted confirmation that the ALP is prepared to play both sides of the fence over the Your Rights At Work v WorkChoices battle then check out nelsonfacts.com It's an attack website put together by the national secretariat of the ALP. The site pretty much spends its entire energy ripping into new Liberal Leader and current Tool Of The Week Brendan Nelson for his support of the WorkChoices laws. The site is Authorised by ALP National Secretary Tim Gartrell, who was fellated in a nauseating piece in the SMH over the weekend as if he personally was responsible for getting rid of the Howard Government, rather than the thousands of ordinary Australians in the Your Rights At Work campaign who actually DID make a difference. I mean, after all, all Tim had to do was turn up on election night - the heavy lifting had been done out in the marginals for him. Left to his own devices he would have given us a repeat of his brilliant performance in the 2004 campaign, where he succeeded in making the Liberal Party look attractive enough for them to get control of the senate. If the laws are as bad as Mr Gartrell and the Federal secretariat of the ALP say they are, then why is the ALP government sitting on their hands whistling Dixie as if WorkChoices isn't a very real problem faced by working people STILL. And the very modest changes they are proposing (that won't take effect for half a year at the earliest) do nothing to help people who:

• Are forced to sign an AWA to get a job in the next six months
• Want the union to visit their workplace to help organise co-workers
• Work in the building industry and wish to keep union matters confidential (gaolable offence if they refuse)
• Work in the building industry and want to promote their union at work
• Want to include content now prohibited in collective agreements, such as union training.
• Have the conditions Tim Gartrell is so keen to promote ripped out of their work agreements

In the meantime don't speak up - you can still be sacked under Howard's laws for at least another six months, probably longer if we take the word of Julia Gillard. What we are seeing here is a grade one, first class exercise in hypocrisy. The ALP was quite happy to hide behind the Your Rights At Work campaign to get into office - now they are there they are not exactly exerting themselves to protect Australians who are under the gun with these new laws. It's a cynical, gutless exercise that will blow up in their face if they're not careful.

Tool Of The Week: Have We Got Principles!

"Those are my principals, if you don't like them, I have others." - Groucho Marx.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for the Liberal Party along comes Doctor Brendan Nelson – ex Union Boss, ex ALP Member, ex progressive, in fact it’s probably just best if we think of him as our ex.

The quantum leap in faith taken by the Liberal Party is best summed up by another front-runner for this week’s Tool Of The Week, Tony Abbott, who saw the rise of the good Doctor as an opportunity to announce his own future plans to pick up the pieces after the inevitable train wreck we can all see coming.

Dr Nelson has taken up some very reasonable positions in the past; about gay rights, Aboriginal land rights and education, opposition to mandatory sentencing laws, supporting safe injecting rooms and telling it how it is on the Iraq war (it’s about the oil, stupid).

Indeed, Dr Nelson is a man of principal, but if you don’t like those principals he has others.

Think we’re exaggerating? Sydney University’s vice-chancellor, Professor Gavin Brown, described Dr Nelson as “an example of ambition overriding principal”.

The new leader of the Liberal Party is someone who said that he would feel “comfortable” in the Labor Right.

He has come a long way since Arch-conservative former Treasury secretary John Stone described him as “a political hermaphrodite”; while Greg Barns, former staffer to John Fahey when he was Federal Finance Minister, who described Dr McNelson as “totally manufactured”.

Chris Bonner, President of the NSW Secondary Principals Council, gave an insight into the intellectual colossus that is the good Doctor when he said that the then Education Minister, criticised practices there was no evidence of, and came up with policy solutions already being carried out.

He voted for the Iraq war, which we were told at the time were because of WMD’s and Saddam Hussein’s cruelty, then it was only this year he made international headlines ‘fessing up it was about the oil.

He also told us earlier this year that there was “no such thing as victory in Iraq”.

Sydney Lawyer and former Liberal Party member Ifran Yussuf, who was intimate with Dr Nelson’s preselection in 1995, said “Nelson had the kind of flexibility that enabled him to both support and oppose identical policy proposals and still sound completely credible. Issues didn’t matter. What mattered was who was listening and how many votes they could swing.”

Mr Yussuf also revealed he had conversations with Dr Nelson where the doctor presumably read something into Mr Yussef’s name and slammed Israel for its ongoing occupation of the West Bank.

Current NSW Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell recalled to the Sydney Morning Herald in December 2005 that when he was state Liberal party director and Dr Nelson was looking to go into politics, the doctor was really only interested in a safe seat.

Mr O’Farrell also predicted Dr Nelson was “capable of going the whole way in politics”.

What qualities make someone capable of going the whole way in politics, Mr O’Farrell did not say, but the ability to change one’s fundamentally held beliefs in the pursuit of power might be one.

It’s pretty obvious that the dedicated follower of fashion has done a deal with the “uglies” in the ultra-right wing of the NSW Liberal Party, re-branding himself as McNelson - the man who will do whatever it takes to climb the greasy pole of power.

And what a fine bunch he has decided to throw his lot in with.

The secretive cult, the Exclusive Brethren was caught out in February giving thanks for Dr Nelson’s support. A report in the Age newspaper revealed a conversation between Brethren figures, including cult chief Bruce Hales, about a meeting with Dr Nelson which resulted in “unexpected recognition” and favourable treatment.

In this case it was an exemption from testing of computer literacy for students in Brethren schools. Given the written threats the Brethren peddled around during the recent election campaign it looks like he gave the god-botherers an exemption from written literacy as well.

Aside from the nut job religious right, Dr McNelson is also making the right noises for the Party’s free-market ideologues.

Despite admitting the electorate had roundly rejected WorkChoices, he says unfair dismissal laws should not be brought back.

Nelson may have presided over cuts to education, supported nuclear power, voted for the Iraq war, screwed up a multi-billion dollar defence purchase and may be back-pedalling furiously on the ALP’s mandate to rip up WorkChoices, but hey, maybe he doesn’t believe any of this stuff.

After all, a man whose principles can bend like a garden hose on a hot day probably doesn’t believe in anything. Maybe he is taking the free-market mantra of ‘flexibility’ and applying it to facts, beliefs and ideas?

It certainly looks that way.

Look forward to an opposition that will show all the backbone of a garden slug, but with none of the attractiveness.

And with lunatic number one, Tony Abbott, waiting in the wings, the good Doctor’s reign is likely to provide much needed comic relief in the Federal sphere before he takes the Liberal Party right off the rails.