Tears Of A Clown

Akerman's Latest Conspiracy Theory : Beware The "Third Force" In Australian Politics

By Darryl Mason

Liberal Party propagandist and, surely by sheer coincidence, Murdoch media columnist Piers Akerman is shocked, shocked and outraged, by the revelation that the union movement spent some $14 million dollars in 2006 and 2007 telling Australians workers how the now former Howard government's now former WorkChoices regime would eat into their paypackets and family time.

Incredibly, as he half-heartedly tries and fails to fire up some more union-related fear-mongery, Akerman doesn't even mention that the Liberal Party has now utterly dumped its WorkChoices regime and will not stand in the way of the Rudd government freeing Australian workers of it completely in the next few years. WorkChoices is dead and buried, and Brendan Nelson hand-carved its tombstone, but Piers hasn't noticed yet.

Akerman also clamps on his tin foil hat and becomes all conspiratorial as he warns of a "third force" in Australian politics. Outside of the "third force" that is the mainstream media, and the "third force" that is the public relations budgets of our largest corporations, and the "third force" that is the accumulated ad spending power of the business community and the "third force" that is the multi-million dollar budgets of energy and oil industry lobbyists.

He means that other "third force", the one he doesn't like much. The Unions, and GetUp. Boogah!

Akerman thinks it's disgusting that a bunch of unionists can raise millions of dollars at public rallies and spend that money on advertising their point of view. The hide of them participating in public debate and democracy like that. Shocking.

The ACTU funded the anti-WorkChoices advertising campaigns, to little opposition from its members. Whereas you, the taxpayers, funded the former Howard government's pro-WorkChoices advertising campaigns.

The former Howard government spent more than $17 million on advertising its WorkChoices boondoggle in less than 10 months, and that's only until mid-way through 2007. We still don't know how much of taxpayers money Howard And Friends blew flogging WorkChoices from July 2007 through to the eve of the election, but it's easily another $15-$20 million.

Of course, Piers Akerman mentions all this absolutely nowhere at all in his one-eyed screed.

Akerman also refuses to tell readers that former Workplace Relations minister Joe Hockey had a report on his desk at the start of October, detailing how many taxpayers dollars his government was shoveling into its pro-WorkChoices campaign for the 2006-2007 financial year. Nor did Akerman report that Hockey refused to release that report before the election.

And here's some more details of the millions Howard And Friends blew marketing, hyping and generally flogging WorkChoices, which achieved little except annoying the hell out of television viewers every night for months on end :

More than $1 million was spent researching the effectiveness of the ads with the Open Mind Research Group.

And $12.6 million was spent buying advertising space for “welfare to work, support the system and workplace relations system campaigns”.

Dewey and Horton was paid $44,404.25 to take photos for Work Choices advertising while advertising agency Whybin/TBWA received $1.4 million for “creative services” that were part of the Work Choices campaign.

The final tally for the advertising and marketing alone on WorkChoices could hit more than $50-$60 million.

So out of control was Howard's ad blitzing on WorkChoices that in May, 2007, he had spent more on WorkChoices ads than he spent on national security awareness. Terrorists? What terrorists?

Akerman, like the Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt, and like half the op-ed writers at The Australian, still can't believe that the Howard government lost the election, and the Labor Party is now in charge of country.

It's like some kind of waking nightmare for them all, and they've still got their fingers in their ears and their eyes squeezed tightly shut as they chant "This is not happening. This is not happening. This is not happening."

It'd be funny, if it wasn't so sad, bizarre and downright disturbing.

Bolt and Akerman are promoted by their respective newspapers as "leading journalists".

But leading journalists where exactly?

Andrew Bolt is having such a hard time adjusting to the new political reality of Australia that he has now abandoned his Herald Sun blog for more than a month, if not forever :

I hope and expect at this stage to be back in a few weeks - perhaps around Australia Day. I toyed with the idea of keeping the blog going during my holidays, but my wife got angry cross (wife’s edit) and I think I probably need the break, to be honest. I need to look around me for a while, read a bit more, draw breath and recalculate perspective.

Wuss.

Terrorists? What Terrorists? Howard Spends More Flogging WorkChoices Than He Does On National Security Awareness

May 2007 : WorkChoices Forces Grim Future On Workers - Millions Already Work Overtime For No Extra Pay

May 2007 : Taxpayers To Foot Astounding $110 Million And Counting Howard Advertising Bill

June 2007 : WorkChoices Killing Liberals' Election Chances - Millions Of Australians Demand Return of 40 Hour Working Week

June 2007 : Howard's Claim That Australian Families "Have Never Had It So Good" Will Haunt Him All The Way Into The Election

Brendan Nelson Hand Carves WorkChoices Tombstone

Radical New Liberal Policy : "We Are Listening To The Australian People"

What exactly are the Liberal Party going to be opposed to in opposition?

Apparently, the Brendan Nelson led Liberals have vowed to fight to ensure that the Labor Party lives up to promise to rollback the WorkChoices regime they forced onto the Australian people, against their will.

At a news conference with Deputy Leader Julie Bishop, Dr Nelson said the Coalition would now scrutinise the Rudd Labor Government's scrapping of the laws to ensure it was "implemented as stated''.

"We will be working very hard to make sure that the legislation the Labor Party and Mr Rudd present to the Australian Parliament is consistent with the last stated position of the Labor Party,'' he said.

Wow. who needs drugs? Just try and wrap your head around that. The Liberal Party is now going to "scrutinise" the Labor Party's windback of WorkChoices to make sure that they live up to their promise to get rid of the John Howard's biggest political ambition : utterly stripping away the most essential rights of Australian workers, destroying the unions, and handing control of Australia's workforce to the country's biggest corporations.

Nelson is basically saying : "We introduced it, now we're going to make sure that you really get rid of it."

Parliament next year will be hallucinogenic if this is any indication of how Monty Pythonesque the Liberal Party will be in opposition.

The rest of the story :

"We have listened and we have learned, and one of the issues that was very important to the Australian people in changing the Government on November 24 was that of WorkChoices," he said.

"We've listened to the Australian people, we respect the decisions they have made, and WorkChoices is dead."

Dr Nelson said the package of industrial reforms was "one of the reasons'' Australians voted to change the Government.

The Liberal Party insist they are now listening to the Australian people. Talk about a revolution. Actually listening to the majority collective opinion of the Australian people? WorkChoices was brought in because the Liberal Party had spent so long listening to the opinions and demands of Australia's business community.

So WorkChoices is dead. Well, that was a complete waste of another $700 or $800 million dollars.

How many hospitals and schools would that kind of money brought up to world's best standards?

Brendan Nelson is busy chipping away at a new tombstone today. The one that will mark the political grave of Australia's biggest champion of WorkChoices - Joe Hockey.

It's no exaggeration. John Howard really did destroy the Liberal Party.

Dry your eyes.

Millions Of Australians Demand The Return Of The 40 Hour Work Week

Howard's Claim That Australians "Have Never Had it So Good" Will Haunt Him Into The Election

Some 2.5 million Australians are working more than 40 hours a week and they're sick of it. They want their lives back, they want to spend more time with their family and friends. But under changes to the wages and working conditions of most Australia, prime minister John Howard has created a reality where millions of Australians will be working more hours, for less pay.

It will be interesting to see how Howard tries to convince these millions of aggravated Australians that they've "never had it so good", as he infamously stated a few months back, when this is clearly not the case for millions of Australians, struggling with heavy mortgages, longer work weeks and rising fuel, energy and food costs :

Men now put in more than 45 hours a week on average, but more than a third would prefer 38 to 40 hours. Women without dependent children want to work between 32 and 35 hours, not their current average of 40. And women with children favour working 28 hours.

"People have said it's good to have diversity and flexibility in work hours but Australian workers just crave the old standard working week that's been lost over the last two decades," said Brigid van Wanrooy, a post-doctoral fellow at the Workplace Relations Centre at the University of Sydney.

This week the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed almost a third of Australians work unsocial hours and 37 per cent do extra hours, about half of them for no extra pay.

Dr van Wanrooy said 38 per cent of full-time workers - or 2.5 million people - wanted to work fewer hours, according to the biggest survey. "The trend to long hours has not been a result of workers' preferences."

Australians work some of the longest hours in the industrialised world. Thirty-five per cent of male full-time workers and 19 per cent of full-time working women put in 50 hours or more a week.

The true battle John Howard has to face in the coming election is how to convince the people that working longer hours, and experiencing wealthier lives, with all the trappings of financial success, is better than whatever passes for true happiness. Because there appears to be plenty of Australians who are doing well, but are not all that happy with their lives, mostly because they spend less time with their friends and/or family :

Australians are richer and healthier than ever but busier lives have forced us to re-evaluate what makes us happy.

Increasing numbers of Australians are discovering that despite the booming economy and rampant consumerism, work and wealth may not be the true twin paths to bliss.

Surveys published this week erode traditional ideas about hard work and sacrifice getting you ahead; the Australian Bureau of Statistics says nearly one in five works unpaid overtime. A Housing Industry Association report put housing affordability at its lowest in 23 years nationally, with mortgage repayments accounting for more than 30 per cent of an average first home buyer's income. A typical monthly repayment now tops $3000.

Once a financial problem, the disconnect between salary and the Australian dream of owning a home has become a sociological phenomenon that has erupted into a political pain that spills across generations, creating tensions and regrets and forcing a re-evaluation about what constitutes happiness.

Paul Shepanski, the co-author of a report on the connection between working hours and family breakdown for the Relationships Forum, says there is deep concern about the impact of economic change on relationships. The report found a strong link between long and unpredictable work hours and the breakdown of family and other relationships.

"People are feeling that, despite all this wealth, there is something rotten in the system," says Shepanski, a former partner of Boston Consulting Group. "There's a sense that the pressure just keeps mounting but there is no pay-off for increasing productivity in the workplace and all the labour-saving devices that we have at home."

The Relationships Forum research, published in March, showed Australia is the only high-income country that combines very long average working hours with a high level of work at unsocial times - during weeknights and weekends - and a significant proportion of casual employment. After incremental change in working patterns over 30 years Australia has emerged as one of the world's most intensely work-focused countries, but it has created a human tragedy.

"The past three decades of prosperity experienced by Australia have come at an unexpected price," Shepanski says.

More than 20 per cent of employees work 50 hours or more each week, and more than 30 per cent regularly work on weekends. About 2 million people now lose at least six hours of family time to work Sundays, and those hours are not fully compensated for during the week.

"The cold statistics provide vital clues to the thousands of relationships in crisis across our country. Long and atypical working patterns are associated with dysfunctional family environments," Shepanski says.

All this is causing huge problems for Howard, who is happy to push the line "you've never had it so good" as a pre-election reminder to supporters to hold fast.

Howard, who has undisputed claim to the economy card, is punting that voters will focus on his economic management advantage closer to the election, as voters have tended to do. But Howard cannot be sure the tide against him can be so turned.

Both Howard and Rudd are pitching that the good times will continue to roll, but ordinary Australians are shouldering the burden of paying for the good times. With health, education, welfare and superannuation increasingly privatised, risks once borne by government and business have been transferred onto households. The International Monetary Fund is worried about this global trend. The household sector "has increasingly and more directly become the shock absorbers of last resort in the financial system", it warned in 2005.

The Last Days Of Prime Minister John Howard - Faces Devastating Election Defeat

Millions Of Australians Work Overtime For No Extra Pay

Taxpayers To Foot Astounding $111 Million Bill For Government Advertising

And the Howard government's advertising spending splurge just keeps on getting bigger :

THE Federal Government plans to spend $111.2 million on advertising campaigns this year on everything from bushfire awareness and cervical cancer vaccinations to sensitive policy debates such as workplace relations and private health insurance.

As the Coalition and Labor clashed over whether the Government was running politically motivated advertisements, officials from the Prime Minister's department told a Senate estimates hearing there were 18 current campaigns.

The budget for buying media space for these campaigns was $111.2 million - not including expenses such as advertising agency fees or market research.

The most expensive campaigns included Defence Force recruitment advertisements, with a $17.4 million media placement budget, advertisements promoting superannuation tax changes - $15.8 million - and a $14.5 million campaign promoting private health insurance.

It looks like the anger and outrage from the Australian public, aired all over the media yesterday has already forced the government to rein in its splurging on propaganda relating to workplace changes :

Outside the hearing the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Joe Hockey, said no decision had been made on whether to continue the industrial relations ads beyond this week.

He conceded the Government had got its original Work Choices legislation wrong by allowing employers to negotiate agreements that removed entitlements such as penalty rates without compensation. "I wasn't the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations in the past, but if you're saying to me that we got it wrong in the past, well we did."

"We got it wrong."

Labor's industrial relations spokeswoman, Julia Gillard, said that as well as the $4 million cost of media space for the campaign, $475,000 had been spent on newspaper advertisements the weekend after it was decided to change Work Choices.

"The Prime Minister has failed to explain how wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars on pre-election PR campaigns is compatible with prudent economic management."

Of course the Howard government loves to prattle on and on about its "prudent economic management." It's already clear that Howard & Co. are going to use the good health of the Australian economy as the backbone of its re-election campaign.

As usual, though, the Howard government only signaled a change of its splurging habits when it became clear the public was disgusted, and this level of disgust would impact on its re-election chances, as grim as they already are.

Howard Spends More On Industrial Relations Propaganda Than National Security Awareness

Australian Public Furious Over The Millions Howard & Co. Waste Praising Itself Through Relentless Advertising

The John Howard government is quickly spiralling into a pit of no return over widespread public outrage centred on the vast amounts of taxpayer money being spent on government propaganda.

The outrage yesterday was centred around a second, probably more expensive, series of advertisements trying convince the public that changes to their working conditions and pay are good for them. This new campaign comes after an earlier advertising blitz by the government that tried to sell us the same fantasy, at a cost of some $60 million.

But the majority of the Australian public made it clear, months ago, that they don't like 'WorkChoices' and no amount of flashy, wall-to-wall propaganda is going to change their minds.

Howard seems absolutely mystified about this reaction, as though he can't comprehend that Australians know when they are being fed outrageous lies and spin. After 11 years, and more than $1.7 billion worth of government propaganda, or 'awareness campaigns', it appears the vast majority of Australians have now fully woken up to Howard's use of taxpayer funded advertising to attempt to shape the minds and guide the opinions of the people.

It's clearly not working anymore.

The Australian government finally realised last week that the 'WorkChoices' brand name it gave to its widely unpopular industrial relations reforms is absolutely worthless, and had to be dumped.

So they decided to rename the program of reforms, as though they believed the Australian public would think it was all something new and different, instead of the same reheated degradation of their working lives.

From the rage and disgust being vented across talk back radio, letters to the editor and thousands of blog comments, it is clear that millions of Australians are insulted by this latest Howard trick.

In just seven days, the Australian government will have spent more than $4 million of taxpayers money on advertising new changes, and a new name, for its beleaguered reforms of the Australian workplace. That is, the reforms of the reforms that only two months ago they said would not change at all.

In comparison, the Australian government spent only $4.8 million over 16 months in advertising related to national security.

Wasn't terrorism supposed to be the greatest threat to the Australian public? If the government's rampaging advertising splurges are to be believed, it now considers its own workplace reforms to be the greater threat.

Or at least, it believes the public widespread rejection of the reforms is the greatest threat to the government's existence, and chances of being re-elected come November :

A Senate estimates committee heard yesterday the Government would spend $4.1million of taxpayers' money on a single week of advertising about its plans to introduce a fairness test as part of its Work Choices laws, while it had spent $4.8million on a 16-month campaign on security.

The spending revealed "quite a lot" about the Government's spending priorities, ALP senator John Faulkner said. He calculated the IR ad spending would cost $28,472 an hour.

The attack came as John Howard rejected Labor's criticism of the Government's $111million spending on advertisements, accusing Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd of hypocrisy.

And the wasting of taxpayers money doesn't end there. The Howard government is now planning an 'awareness campaign' related to climate change that will shake more than $50 million out of the taxpayers.

$50 million to tell us about the reality of climate change? Are they out of their f..king minds?

Or will the 'climate change campaign' be something else altogether? Yet another publicly funded exercise in the government patting itself on the back?

Of course it will be. Haven't most of the government's advertising campaigns been, either directly or indirectly, a way of shouting to the Australian public "Lookit! We did good! Lookit! Thank us! Praise us! We trieds real hards to be good! Lookit!"

Whatever happened to just shutting the hell up and getting on with your job? It used to be the Australian way.

Howard & Co, however, just can't stop talking about how great a job they think they've been doing, all the while ignoring the obvious fact that Australians now work harder, and longer, than they have in a century, and this is one of the chief reasons why the economy is doing so well right now.

Not according to Howard & Co. It's all because of them, and they won't let you forget it.

The remarkably sensitive Howard government needs all the praise it can get, even if it has to praise itself. At the expense of the taxpayers of course.

Australians are clearly sick of the government wasting their money like this, and, quite bizarrely, the use of taxpayers money to fund political advertising may now likely be one of the more controversial issues of the coming federal election. This is, of course, the time when the government spends more money than usual on advertising.

How will the Howard government counter Labor claims and piles of proof of the money they've wasted in the past 11 years on advertising?

Perhaps with another round of advertising. Yes. That's the ticket. Another $50 million worth of ads telling us why they don't waste our money on advertising.

The rising tide of absurdities and ironies now dragging the Howard government down into the deepest, darkest depths grows larger by the day. And this time, they won't be able to ad-spend their way out of trouble.

The Australian public are well and truly onto them now. And they're bloody pissed off about it.

As they well should be.


UPDATE : A rough estimate, by my reckoning, says the $50 million the government intends to spend on self-praise over its alleged plans to combat climate change would outfit more than 3500 Australian homes with a pretty decent solar power set-up, and a rainwater tank.

3500 homes on solar and rainwater for the cost of a Howard government ad campaign that will tell us nothing we don't already know, or can't find out for ourselves, if we're interested enough to want to know more.

3500 homes!

Ahh, you can only dream they'd spend the money in such a practical way.



More Outrageous Howard Splurging Of Public Money : $540,000 To Renovate A Dining Room - Cancelled After Public Airs Its Disgust

Howard Admits Coalition Faces Annihilation At Federal Election - Says He Has No More "Rabbits" To Pull Out Of His Hat

A Small Slice Of The Public Opinion On 'WorkChoices' And Howard's Changes To The Australian Workplace - Sad Tales And Horror Stories

Howard Splurges $20 Million On Maintaining Two Homes When He Only Needs One

Rudd Promises To Restrict Government Spending On Advertising Campaigns