News That's Fit To Punt - 20/Oct/2015

He Said "Cunt-Struck"

Today's odd little furore is this thing here where one Michael Lawler used the term 'cunt-struck', on Four Corners.

The offending phrase occurred towards the end of a bizarre and damning program examining the relationship between former Health Services Union boss Kathy Jackson and Lawler. 

"I'll be characterised as that scumbag, crook, fraudster, and, at the very best, somebody who's been bewitched by an evil harridan, namely Kathy [Jackson]," Lawler told Caro Meldrum-Hanna. 

"That I'm cunt-struck and that I have been utterly taken in by somebody who's a serious crook," he said.
One person who has been intimately involved in the case from the start reportedly turned to his partner in disbelief and said, 'Tell me he just said 'dumbstruck'."

Ha. No, he did not say dumbstruck at all; and so the wowsers went into top gear and you could hear the whine from where I was down in Kingsgrove. The Macquarie definition for cunt-struck seems to miss the mark as well. It's not that the person who is cunt-struck is "infatuated with a woman", it is the fact that the act of sexual congress with a specific woman has altered their perceptions of reality around them in such a way as to benefit that woman's perspective completely. 

Amazingly there's somebody there who claims to not have heard the term before. I remember when I first heard it - it wasn't long after the film 'Starstruck' came out in the 1980s. Yes, that's right, I heard it way back then, so some of these people really are sheltered. It is a mental state that I have catalogued as one to avoid, but it does make you less pliable in a relationship, and people start referring to you as an evil cynic. 

Just as an aside, I heard a term with which I wasn't familiar, just this last weekend when people were discussing the 'Fifty Shades of Grey' auto-generator. The term was 'Cock Snot'. I'd never heard that term before so I guess I'm pretty sheltered too.  

The Perils Of Student Politicians

While we're on the topic of Kathy Jackson, Pleiades sent in an article from Crikey penned by Guy Rundle. It appears Mr. Rundle is very familiar with the student politician career of Kathy Jackson. 

I'm going to be a little naughty and quote a big chunk:

That’s the real story behind the Jackson disaster, and the Craig Thomson affair that preceded it: the utter decadence, the real moral squalor that has infected sections of the Labor Party Right, and that other sections of the Right have failed to address with any seriousness. This moral decline has deep roots and complex causes, but part of it comes down to the collapse of a genuine Right/Left conflict within the party in the 1980s. The factions remained, but the real differences that had made them a rational form of political organisation had vanished. So the Right, always bound up with capital to a greater degree, simply became a machine without content. The unions that formed its base had been steadily amalgamated into super-unions with a dissolved relation to the particular occupations and workers they represented. In the years of full arbitration and centralised wages fixing, they had relatively little scope to make their own deals. When enterprise bargaining took over from awards-and-demarcation system, workers got the worst of both worlds from such unions: they were quasi state-apparatuses, laced into state power to administer labour, and they had a free hand to make deals with major employers. Their heads and officers came not from the floor, but overwhelmingly from student politics, as the first post-student step in a political career. The distance between leaders and led in right-wing Australian unions, always wide, became cavernous. There appears to have developed a real contempt and disdain for the people they represented. 

In the case of the HSU, that disdain is sickening, utterly disgusting. All workers deserve to be properly represented, but there must be a special circle of hell for someone who whacks the plastic to the tune of $1 million-plus from the people who do the grunt work on basic wages, looking after those with chronic illnesses, cancers, and all that flesh is heir to -- work that often demands, even from those furthest from actual medical intervention, a bit or a lot more than many others are asked to give in their jobs. To represent such people should be a privilege and an honour, the cornerstone of a meaningful life. To turn it into a freeloaders’ picnic is not the only example of the decadent and diminished place the Labor Right has come to, but it’s one of the most visible. This is more than just taking a bit off the top. This is the betrayal of a membership -- and of a wider political movement. Labor is soft at the centre because the Right is soft at the centre, a quagmire made by two decades of the cynical politicking and character deformation of which Jackson is an example.

Goodness, look at the density of that text and deep conviction in denouncing Jackson. It sure saps credibility from the union movement, and by extension the ALP and Bill Shorten. It's not just a scandal, it's a fiasco and imbroglio, all rolled into one

Who The Hell Is Heffernan Talking About?

Mr. Fake Pipe Bomb himself, Bill Heffernan thinks that a former PM might be a pedophile. He's just not telling us which one. I know we've had 5 in 5 years, but the living PMs only go so far back to Bob Hawke. realistically, for what he's talking about to matter, he's talking about Hawke, Keating, Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott and Turnbull. 

A former Australian prime minister is on a list of "alleged paedophiles" that Liberal senator Bill Heffernan claims forms part of a police document. 

Senator Heffernan used a Senate estimates committee hearing on Tuesday to discuss the list of 28 people, which he said formed part of police documents that had been "signed off" by Gary Crooke, QC, the former senior counsel assisting NSW's Wood royal commission into police corruption in the 1990s. 

Many of the people on the list and otherwise named in the documents were "prominent", including a former prime minister, he said: "They were delivered to me by a police agency some time ago because no one seems to want to deal with them." 

Every Commonwealth attorney-general since Philip Ruddock had seen the list, Senator Heffernan said.

You could rule out Abbott & Turnbull because they're too recent to fit the description. You can also rule out Howard because Heffernan is a partisan come hell or high water. That leaves the ALP Prime Ministers, of who, you could probably safely rule out Gillard on the grounds that she is a woman, she too is fairly recent, and she's not a NSW politician. That kind of puts the spotlight on Hawke, Keating and Rudd, and again maybe Rudd is too recent, and he too isn't from NSW. 

It's some crazy shit we're even discussing it, and really you suspect Heffernan is flinging mud only because he's protected by parliamentary privilege. That being said, long time readers might recall that years ago, Bob Collins was revealed to have been a pedophile and rapist after he committed suicide. Since then I've taken the view that one shouldn't be surprised by anything that comes to light. 

News That's Fit To Punt - 17/Aug/2015

When You Are Crap, The World Craps On You

167 bad polls in a row, would tell you something, most likely that you're not loved and you're not going to win.

Inside the Prime Minister's inner circle, they tell themselves that they can win the next election because Bill Shorten is so hopeless. 

They've told themselves that 166 times in a row; that's the number of consecutive polls since the government was ahead in any of them.That's counting all the surveys conducted by all six national pollsters, according to the research consultant John Stirton. 

With today's Fairfax Ipsos poll, they'll have to tell themselves once again, whistling past the graveyard for the 167th time. 

You have to go back 16 months, to a Newspoll in April 2014, to find any survey that put the government ahead. 

"I think the government is essentially stuck" in its long losing rut, says the Ipsos director, Fairfax pollster Jess Elgood. 

The closest Abbott came to breaking into winning territory was with its second budget, in May this year. 

The Coalition levelled with Labor on 50:50, on the election-deciding two-party preferred measure. 

"Its second budget was well received and its polling bumped up," says Elgood.

But three months on, we see that the budget was not an elevator to a higher level of support but a momentary appreciation. 

The electorate doesn't disagree with the Liberals' assessment of Shorten. The Labor leader's approval rating consistently has a minus sign in front of it. It's just that the people think Tony Abbott is even more hopeless. 

The really interesting thing there might be the run of one sentence paragraphs. Gotta love these subeditors out in New Zealand. :)

More seriously... it should be obvious by now that Abbott didn't really win in 2013 on any merit whatsoever except for the single fact that he wasn't from the ALP. It's getting to the point where Abbott's doing serious harm to the country. He might be doing things pleasing to the nut job right wing of the Coalition, but the more they insist on their crappy agenda, the more it locks the entire government into the electorally hated zone. And let's make no mistake, even the long-time Liberal voters in blue-ribbon seats hate Tony Abbott. They only vote Liberal because it's religion (and there's really no cure for that variety of stupid).

Of course, the obvious man with electoral appeal is exactly the man the right wing of the Coalition cannot abide, Malcolm Turnbull; which essentially duplicates - in mirror image - the problem of the Gillard Prime Ministership wherein the factional heads loved Julia Gillard, but she had minimal appeal outside of her base supporters. This allowed Kevin Rudd to stalk her leadership all the way - but the faction leaders hated Rudd too much to have the good sense to go back to him. And so, the right wing powerbrokers of the Liberal Party who continue to back Abbott might end up losing their seats. Worse still, it's threatening to take down swathes of rookie Liberal and National MPs who came to Canberra on Tony Abbott's coattails. These backbench will get restless about that sort of projection. It's the same calculations that brought about the Gillard downfall. It's hard to defy the gravity of 167 losing polls.

The worst thing then, might be to pretend that polls go up and polls go down. In the case of Tony Abbott, they've never gone up enough call 'up'.

More On Dyson Heydon, Partisan Warrior

Not that I was ever close to the possibility of becoming a Rhodes Scholar back in my day at Uni, the notion of becoming a Rhodes Scholar does carry a certain gravitas with it. Well, it did, until I got up closed personal with some of the people who became Rhodes Scholars and quickly came to the conclusion that it wasn't on the basis of the kind of merit or character that normal, ordinary people would call merit or character. Certainly my day, which was the second half of the 1980s, it was abundantly clear that it was more a case of smarm than smarts, charm than marks, connections and patronage than merit or character. I won't name names - it would be boring to do so - but I will say I lost faith in the title long ago.

That Tony Abbott was a Rhodes Scholar gets bandied about as if he were an ace guy on campus. I don't know. He was a decade before my time so it's hard to say for sure but I've long suspected that by the time Tony was handed his, this fine institution had been rendered weak-chinned-and-neutered. Today we find out that none other than Dyson Heydon was on the panel that handed Tony Abbott his Rhodes Scholarship.

Mr Heydon was part of the seven-member Rhodes Trust selection committee in NSW that in 1980 handed the prestigious Rhodes scholarship to the future prime minister, then a 23 year-old student politician at Sydney University.

Tony Abbott, some time before his fateful boxing match that damaged his brain

According to documents seen by Fairfax Media at the NSW state archives on Monday, the selection committee was chaired by former NSW Governor, Sir Roden Cutler and "Professor JD Heydon" was a member.

The emergence of the Rhodes scholarship connection sets the personal relationship between Mr Abbott and his hand-picked judge to lead the trade union royal commission back decades.

Which all goes to show, it was smarm, charm, connections and patronage.  The men might deny - as they must, and as is their wont - but as any reasonable person could surmise, Tony Abbott was nothing special:

In his 2012 essay Political Animal, journalist David Marr, recounts how Mr Abbott "impressed a panel of worthies chaired by the governor of NSW, Sir Roden Cutler". 

"For Anglophiles and rugby players, the Rho­des was died-and-gone-to-heaven time. Winners must be scholars fond of sport who display "moral force of character and instincts to lead". The award to Abbott came as a surprise, particularly to those who had seen him up close on the SRC. One jibe at the time was, 'second-grade footballer, third-rate academic and fourth-class politician.'," Marr wrote.

Some men know how to cheapen the most impregnable heights of Empire. That's our Tony - everything he touches turns out cheapened; even the Rhodes Scholarship, even the Prime Minister's office. In some ways it is remarkable that a man could be of such low character and not get noticed on the way to the highest of offices. But that's how patronage works - picking out the people who would continue your cultural prejudices. And really, that's the kind of miserable government we've got, thanks largely to Tony Abbott.

As for Dyson Heydon, it seems he was getting his back scratched nicely by getting this appointment to look into corruption in the Unions. A real a snout-in-the-trough appointment by Tony to repay an old debt. Merit and character be damned. 

Mac Bank Boss Calls Out Government, Government Wimps Out

It seems to happen every day these days that the Liberal Party's own supporting lobbies step forward and slam the government for its bad governance and absence of policy worth spit. This time it's Macquarie Bank, which must feel like friendly fire with a howitzer in the back. 

Kevin McCann, the chairman of Macquarie Group, says the state of policy in Canberra is so dispiriting he feels he has to say something, despite his wariness about entering the political debate. 

In rare public criticism of the government of the day, Mr McCann has called on the Abbott government to stop fighting so many policy battles at once and to try to focus on just two or three priority areas.

"I've always been reluctant as chairman of a large company to start lecturing politicians and the community about what they should do, but I think I'm reluctantly changing that," Mr McCann said on Monday.

"With no disrespect to [Treasurer] Joe Hockey or [Assistant Treasurer] Josh Frydenberg, policy seems to have fallen off the table in Canberra."

Which is, neither here nor there, on its own. This bit however is pretty telling:

Mr McCann said on Monday that the Abbott government was failing to take the public with them on crucial policy reform and they desperately need to construct a narrative the public will find believable. 

And he singled out the Commission of Audit report as an example of the way in which the government had bungled its political messaging over the last 12 months. 

"I think it was a mistake to have the Commission of Audit say the country was busted, because the community knew that we weren't busted," Mr McCann said. 

"Surely we've got budget issues, but at the moment the community [feels] 'we're doing okay, why do we have to go through all this pain?' We've got to stop lecturing these people, we've got to have conversations and we've got to build up support," he said.
Mr McCann was speaking at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry's business leaders' summit, held at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. 

He was sharing a panel with Mr Frydenberg whom defended the government's reform efforts, saying it is unfair to say policy has fallen off the table.
"The question [is], how do we get [reforms] through Parliament?" Mr Frydenberg said to the audience. 

"Let's call a spade a spade. The Productivity Commission ... was tasked by us to produce a blueprint for reform in industrial relations. [But] before they had even released their interim report the unions had come out against it. 

"[You should] say to our political opponents, don't run scare campaigns on issues as important as IR before the report has even hit the desk."

Good God Josh Frydenberg! So that awful Productivity Commission report which was a wishlist of crazy rightwing wet dream fantasies was the blueprint, and now that the Unions got up in arms and opposed it, they don't feel like they can get it through? It's not as if it's - God forbid! - a hung Parliament. They have the majority in the Lower House and the Senate has always been the place where negotiations took place. Just because you don't have the skills, patience, brains or stomach to negotiate in good faith, doesn't mean Australia's somehow ungovernable. It means you are insufficient to the task. It means you're not competent, worthy or appropriate for the job. It means you should quit. 

News That's Fit To Punt - 12/Jul/2015

Are They Petty? Or Are They Just Bog Stupid?
It turns out all that weird attacking of wind farms calling them ugly, was covering fire to cut investment into wind power in this country.

Treasurer Joe Hockey and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann​ have issued the so-called green bank with a directive to change its investment mandate, prohibiting new wind funding. It's understood the directive was issued without the approval or knowledge of Environment Minister Greg Hunt, angering the minister.  

The decision is another blow for the multibillion-dollar wind industry, which has just started to recover from the uncertainty created by the government's Renewable Energy Target review. Analysts say $8.7 billion is expected to be invested in wind power in the next five years, while the corporation has invested about $300 million in wind projects to date.

And international investors are warning the government's move sends a bad message about how safe it is to do business in Australia.
The directive is just the latest salvo in the government's attacks on the wind industry.

Good grief. So much for "Open for Business". We know they're fighting a rearguard action against the eventual move from fossil fuel to renewables that must inevitably take place so it's not that difficult to see that the top level of this government is deliberately mismanaging an issue to suit their crony-capitalist friends. But then there seems to be a belief in this government that Tony Abbott's own unpopularity gives him carte-blanche to just do what his cronies want because he's never going to be popular for ever doing the right things. If the electorate is not going to reward you for doing the right things, then it seems they're willing to damn the electorate and do their corporate masters' bidding and secure themselves a lucrative after-political-life. 

Which is to say, under Tony Abbott, Australia's polity has become no better than Indonesia. At this point in time, we're Indonesia-without-the executions. This place only looks respectable to people because it's white middle-aged men in suits running these crappy policies up the flagpole. You'd think this was the 1950s - which is exactly what Tony Abbott wants. Tony Abbott only needs look to his own faith to see how far off base he is on the issue, in this day and age when the Pope issues encyclicals about protecting the environment and curbing carbon emissions, slamming corporate greed as the Devil's own Droppings. You sort of wonder how he can sustain his opposition to things like Renewable Energy and kinder treatment of asylum seekers on the basis of his religion and not listen to his Pope. Evidently, it has nothing to do with his faith, it's all to to do with uncompromising cultural prejudices.

Using Federal Money To Tar The Opposition

This lousy circus that is the Royal Commission into union corruption keeps rolling like an unwanted circus caravan, waiting to find its miserable end. Earlier in the piece it was Julia Gillard who fronted the commission to explain her time at Slater and Gordon working as an IR lawyer, wherein she might have been a little irregular with some paperwork. Now it is Bill Shorten in the dock, being asked whether he short-changed his union members to cut a deal with the business sector. It's kind of weird that the Abbott government is asking these questions, seemingly-suddenly-amazingly interested in the welfare of the rank and file union members. We'll put that bizarre irony aside for a moment and ask the simple rhetorical question, what does this look like?

It looks like one of those show trials seen in military juntas and theocratic councils when they put the opposition on trial for being the Opposition. The Kim Dynasty did this a lot (now they just shoot them). Malaysia keeps doing it to Anwar. The Gang of Four in Communist China did this sort of thing to purge the enemies of Maoism and ended up in their own show trial. It goes on in Iran to this day and heck, even South Korea does this to presidents who leave office at the end of term. What all those countries have in common is that they don't have democratically functioning states. Even the ones that purport to be democratic and have elections can't be said to be functioning properly if they're doing show trials of the opposition. 

However, "a loyal opposition" is a difficult concept for a lot of countries that simply don't understand the adversarial system of law that developed in the English speaking world. Its underpinnings are culturally alien to them and so they concoct these kinds of show trials. It's a dead giveaway that they don't get democracy. 

Imagine my grievance and dismay then to see the Opposition Leader of this land, sitting in the dock over this stupid political show trial in Australia; Australia, the once most progressive nation in the English speaking world, reduced to the spectacle of a political show trial. You'd think we were Indonesia-without-the-executions; but no, we're even worse than that because they've stopped doing these for now in a sign that they've begun to get democracy. Clearly, our own political leadership has lost the plot. The exasperation in that photo says it all. 

What Yanis Varoufakis Has To Say About The Debt Deal For Greece

Pleiades sent in this nugget. Yanis Varoufakis has a piece in the Guardian. 

In 2010, the Greek state became insolvent. Two options consistent with continuing membership of the eurozone presented themselves: the sensible one, that any decent banker would recommend – restructuring the debt and reforming the economy; and the toxic option – extending new loans to a bankrupt entity while pretending that it remains solvent. 

Official Europe chose the second option, putting the bailing out of French and German banks exposed to Greek public debt above Greece’s socioeconomic viability. A debt restructure would have implied losses for the bankers on their Greek debt holdings.Keen to avoid confessing to parliaments that taxpayers would have to pay again for the banks by means of unsustainable new loans, EU officials presented the Greek state’s insolvency as a problem of illiquidity, and justified the “bailout” as a case of “solidarity” with the Greeks. 

To frame the cynical transfer of irretrievable private losses on to the shoulders of taxpayers as an exercise in “tough love”, record austerity was imposed on Greece, whose national income, in turn – from which new and old debts had to be repaid – diminished by more than a quarter. It takes the mathematical expertise of a smart eight-year-old to know that this process could not end well. 

Once the sordid operation was complete, Europe had automatically acquired another reason for refusing to discuss debt restructuring: it would now hit the pockets of European citizens! And so increasing doses of austerity were administered while the debt grew larger, forcing creditors to extend more loans in exchange for even more austerity.

And that's about as succinct as it can be put. In the 9 years since the GFC broke, I've had to think a fair bit about what the bail outs and Quantitative Easing meant. The best explanationI can give you is that it is an attempt to freeze the clock so that the participants in the world's greatest casinos have time to take their chips of the table and walk away without cashing in the losses, while the bill is sent to Joe Q Public. In the aftermath governments ran out of money do their normal government-y things, and so they committed to 'austerity' which further shrunk the economy and made things worse. Iceland, which refused to give the bankers a pass, has recovered nicely, which tells you something about all this glorious QE I II and 4Eva we've seen. 

David Cameron of course did have one standup moment where he declared he would not balance the books of the United Kingdom on the backs of the poor and needy. It's a great line, whether he actually followed through on it or not. It perfectly describes what Germany is doing- balancing its own books on the backs of the poor and needy in Greece. Whether 'Grexit' happens or not, the world's sympathies are with the Greeks on this fact alone. If Grexit should happen, the Greeks at least would have a fighting chance. As for Deutsche Bank that has trillions in derivatives tied to Greek bonds, I don't think we'll give them much sympathy when it all blows up, and Angela Merkel has to clean up that mess. 

Answer The Questions

Part 1 - "We Did What?"

This week's odd burbling news is that our government officials paid people smugglers to take asylum seekers back to Indonesia. It is in many ways unsurprising that such a thing should happen when our government decides that 'Stop the Boats' is some kind of high-minded policy platform instead of an electioneering slogan that it was to begin with. Indonesia are investigating the claims, an their foreign minister has called in the freshly returned Australian ambassador for a "please explain" chat. naturally, the Prime Minister is dodging answering the questions. To not too fine a point on it, it is reported that he is not denying it.

I mean, really? Is that what you've got Tony Abbott?

So what we are now to make of this government is that it doesn't want transparency or scrutiny, it doesn't want to be answerable to the people, it doesn't want to explain its thinking or its methodology, and it sure as hell doesn't want to criticised for the on-arrival of asylum seekers on boats and the manner which it delvers such results.

In short, you have a government that is holding all of us in contempt as it takes us down some very dangerous directions with regards to our human rights record. Honestly, it's a joke that this was good governance promised by this bunch of buffoons.

Part 2 - "You Wouldn't Have Cared Then, And You Don't Really Care Now"

Meanwhile the insidious trawl through the mud of unions has fished upside awkward facts about the stewardship of the AWU by Bill Shorten, back in the day when he was its president, continues. The strange thing about the ALP is that its total symbiosis with the union movement means that it's always going to throw up veterans of union politics as their political candidates - unless you're Kevin Rudd and we all saw what happened to him. The increasing awareness we have of this symbiosis is actually what is driving down the ALP primary vote as the genuinely leftists move to the Greens while educated social democrats are stranded outside of the ALP power structure, unable to help it change - but these are all gripes for another day.

The whole inquiry into union corruption is a cover for the coalition to be using the power of the state to impugn their opponents like some tinpot dictatorship in Africa, but given the depth to which this government is willing to sink, it should come as no surprise then that this kangaroo court wants to interview the leader of the Opposition. Then again, it is the same government that wants to indulge in stripping people of their citizenship,so we shouldn't be surprised that they want to behave in a manner that can only be described as rampant authoritarianism.

We've had patriarchal governments before but this is the first government in my memory that tries to behave like a teenage bully rather than a scolding father, in order to get its way.

From The Sidelines

The Gap Between Common Sense And A Coup

Following on from the post about the High Court judgment against the Malaysian Solution the other day, I had the rare opportunity to ask one of our preeminent human rights lawyers about our constitution and government - specifically about the spectre I raised the other day of "what happens if the Prime Minister pushes for policy and orders the ADF to ship the asylum seekers to Malaysia, ignoring the High Court's decision?"

The answer I got back was that the High Court would issue an injunction against that course of action, which in turn would lead to the ADF desisting.

"Even if it was a direct order from the Prime Minister?" I asked. And he said yes, because the top level of the ADF reports to the rule of law itself.

"What if the generals agreed with the Prime Minister and followed orders and did it?" I asked.

"Well then, you would have a coup."

As in Coup D'etat.

The way he explained it, the top level brass of the ADF are answerable to the rule of law, (and not the office of the Prime Minster) which is an abstraction of what is allowable under the law. Which is why the General would exercise common sense and desist when the injunction came; and is exactly the common sense being practised by the Prime Minister in not pursuing such a radical course of action to push policy, according to the preeminent human rights lawyer.In fact all of our top level government runs on the assumption that all these people will act with this common sense.

In fact, he went on, when the whole Gough Whitlam dismissal was going on, a Unionist piped up and told Gough he should mobilise the army to stop the Governor General getting his way. Whitlam dismissed the suggestion as being outrageous - and lacking in common sense - and so he never went to the army to back his government in 1975. And this, according to the preeminent human rights lawyer, is how democratic government is practiced in a civlilised nation.

I have to tell you I felt very afraid that the only thing standing in the way of a coup was the presumption of common sense being held by people in power. I look at Tony Abbott and the way he carries on and I doubt he has anything like what we would call common sense. I would live in fear that he would be entirely short of such common sense.

I share this with you all in the best spirit that may we all live under a government with plentiful common sense.

The Big Protest

Making the news today was the crowd of 30,000 + people in the domain protesting against the NSW government's attack on the public sector workers. They seem to do this every time a conservative government gets into office in NSW. I seem to recall they did this in the early 1990s when Nick Greiner got in, and the protests did nothing. They had the numbers and did as they pleased.

Big Warwick reports that the Police Union were there which was good for moral support, but that the prison wardens were there. "Who's looking after the prisoners today then?" asked some wag. If the Health Sector Union were in there, then it meant the mentally ill were also on the loose, so to speak. Crazies and Prisoners running riot was a nice mental image.

I get that these unions are angry to have their pay rises indexed at 2.5% which is below CPI - and we all know that CPI tends to under-report inflation. It's a kind of bad faith by the NSW Government. It's also part of a global trend in the wake of the GFC to try and pare back public spending. Why should these people take a pay cut? Because if they don't the NSW Government will have to sack a whole bunch of them instead. You can see both sides of the argument if you step back and look at it calmly, but nobody is ever going to be calm when it's their hip pocket (and you certainly have to respect that too).

The irony that doesn't get missed is that when it comes to politicians giving themselves a pay rise, they never say no.