On Sydney's 2UE this morning:
The Howard Government is now planning to have an army of inspectors to monitor its so-called fairness test to make sure you are not being duded of pay and conditions. This is kind of becoming farcical now isn’t it? They tried to back peddle on this Work Choices disaster. 600 new bureaucrats at a cost of an extra $370 million over four years which kind of highlights the stupidity of what they have done. Once we just had the Industrial Relations Commission and the state bodies, independent outfits which heard wage cases and set standards, you could take them a dispute. Now under John Howard, we have a bureaucratic spider web. The Workplace Advisory Service, the Workplace Authority, previously known as the Office of the Employment Advocate, the Workplace Ombudsman, previously known as the Office of Workplace Services, the Fair Pay Commission secretariat and there is a whole bunch of others as well. Must have cost them a fortune change the stationary let alone the advertising. But could you imagine trying to find your way through that lot, whether you are a worker or an employer? Just imagine if you are in small business, honestly trying to do the right thing, who do you go to? The Workplace Advisory Service? The Workplace Authority, previously known as the Office of the Employment Advocate? What do you do? Driven by knee jerk ideology this government has made a total hash of industrial relations. All they needed to do really was take the old unfair dismissal laws work better for small business, that was essential, had to be done. Instead they threw the baby out with the bathwater. Anyway, it all goes before Parliament this week.
