Wednesday Addams comes of age

click to enlarge — captured by jarcob

Cover from A2 (insert in The Age, Melbourne)
23 February 2008

Yes, ladies, you too could have that moontanned look of the moment.

Tawdry. Petulant. Immature. Unwell.

She’s wrong and she’s sorry, ba-a-aby...

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send in the clowns

Judy Collins

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Goat Friday

click to enlarge  —  image source dervaesinstitute.org

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Australian Workplace Agreements: non-existent figures released

From an Australian Government press release:

The Workplace Authority has provided the Government with data compiled and analysed from a sample of over 1700 Australian Workplace Agreements lodged between April and October 2006, data the previous Liberal government claimed didn’t exist.

The analysis of the 1748 AWAs shows that 89 per cent removed at least one so-called protected award condition:

• 89 per cent excluded one or more so-called protected award conditions
• 83 per cent excluded two or more so-called protected award conditions
• 78 per cent excluded three or more so-called protected award conditions
• 71 per cent excluded four or more so-called protected award conditions
• 61 per cent excluded five or more so-called protected award conditions
• 52 per cent excluded six or more so-called protected award conditions
• 40 per cent excluded seven or more so-called protected award conditions
• 30 per cent excluded eight or more so-called protected award conditions
• 16 per cent excluded nine or more so-called protected award conditions
• 8 per cent excluded ten or more so-called protected award conditions
• 2 per cent excluded all eleven so-called protected award conditions

The analysis also revealed the so-called protected award conditions that were most frequently removed:

• 70 per cent removed shift work loadings
• 68 per cent removed annual leave loadings
• 65 per cent removed penalty rates
• 63 per cent removed incentive based payments and bonuses
• 61 per cent removed days to be substituted for public holidays
• 56 per cent removed monetary allowances
• 50 per cent removed public holidays payment
• 49 per cent removed overtime loadings
• 31 per cent removed rest breaks
• 25 per cent removed declared public holidays

The limited data revealed that 75 per cent of the 1487 AWAs sampled did not provide for a guaranteed wage increase.

These are the statistics the former Liberal government didn’t want to tell the Australian people about. These are the individual statutory agreements that the Liberal Party brought to Australian working families.

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Observation #479

click to enlarge  —  image source Carlo Kopp

Idly gazing into the garden this morning again confirms that relations among so-called ‘native’ doves are not, as their symbolism might suggest, all peace and understanding.

The males of this ostensibly gentle species contend with each other by sidling up to their rivals and lashing out with their wings, using them as kind of improvised bullwhips.

The action produces a mini-sonic-boom — *thwack* — delivering a potentially nasty blow to the opponent.

It’s all quite serious, I’m sure, but the ritualised violence of these Mister Beans of the bird-world strikes me as rather comically like a couple of boisterous adolescents flicking each other with wet towels.

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Maverick experiment in ‘free-speech’ ends desultorily

With sadness, this blog now reports that Harry Heidelberg’s club chaos (a.k.a., kramgasse, sydneysphere, etc.) has closed.

Well, we think it has closed. Actually, we’re fairly certain it has closed. Hang on... nah, it’s definitely closed.

This blog refutes — unequivocally and categorically (just for good measure) — any suggestion or implication of any part in the demise of this maverick experiment in free-speech that has ended so desultorily.

Oddly enough, it may be remarked, the maverick free-speech experiment has ended — at least, we’re fairly certain it has actually and palpably ended — with calls of “p*ss off” and threats of censorship to known groups from the known blogmeister.

Lots of fun was had by some at the expense of some, and then by others at the expense of some others — but mostly by just one, who now chooses to fold.

At the end of the day, however, the fat lady has sung, the ducks have come home to roost, before going to water, the curtain has downed, the rhetoric faded, the dream dispelled, the wretched of the earth arisen, the blurb has blahhed ... um ... and the baton of the chimeric free-speech ideal has been passed on to...

To...?

UPDATE

In other bloggery ‘news’, Damian Lataan again has featured on Tim Blair’s blog, apparently courtesy of a contributor calling himself Eliot R.

(Suggestion to Lataan: Get the Adsense happening now, immediately, before the blairbots descend and the ‘charming’ begins.)

Perhaps a long shot, but one wonders if Eliot R. is one and the same Eliot Ramsey, the prolific contributor to Webdiary who’s recently been ‘granted’ a furlough until St Patrick’s Day by the Webdiary moderator(s). Nice to see Mr R. isn’t allowing himself to go soft during his downtime.

And it’s especially nice to see current and former Webdiary contributors visiting each other’s blogs, stimulating debate, cross-fertilising ideas with their own brand of fertiliser, advancing vendettas, etc.

The attractions and wonders of bloggery are manifold. I keep meaning to leave, but how could one leave all this?

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