Minchin’s healthy scepticism

Following his defeat in this morning’s Liberal leadership spill, Joe Hockey has said:

“I am not a climate change sceptic. I am someone who believes the Earth deserves the benefit of the doubt.”

Meanwhile, Hockey’s party colleague in the Senate, Nick Minchin, has made no bones about his climate change scepticism.

Senator Minchin apparently has a proven track record in healthy (cough, cough) scepticism; notably, in 1995 he dissented from the majority report of a Senate committee investigating the cost of tobacco related illnesses.

“Senator Minchin wishes to record his dissent from the committee’s statements that it believes cigarettes are addictive and that passive smoking causes a number of adverse health effects for non-smokers,” the committee’s minority report says. “Senator Minchin believes these claims (the harmful effects of passive smoking) are not yet conclusively proved ... there is insufficient evidence to link passive smoking with a range of adverse health effects.”

To support his claims, Senator Minchin drew on a study commissioned by the Tobacco Institute of Australia that “concluded the data did not support a causal relationship between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and lung cancer or heart disease in adults”.

Senator Minchin’s stance flew in the face of voluminous reports by the US Surgeon-General, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, documenting nicotine’s addictive hook and the serious health risks for people exposed to secondary cigarette smoke...

I won’t hold my breath waiting for some enterprising journo to ask Sen Minchin whether he now still believes smoking is not addictive.

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A tale of two Jims.

"You lose a close friend, I say to you: 'David, I'm sorry that you lost your mate Jim'," Howard said. "But I don't say I apologise for it. I don't accept responsibility for it."

The PM, John Howard, with part of his well practiced lawyer’s humbug trotted out regularly when Aboriginal reconciliation is raised. Dead simple and works a treat too – especially on a compliant press corps. In fact, it works so well that the PM was inclined to wheel it out for the latest interest rate rise.

Calling a press conference he fronted the journos, Costello at his side playing Danny Glover to his Mel Gibson, and somberly intoned that he was “sorry”for the sixth rate rise since the ’04 election. Except that he wasn’t actually sorry. What he failed to inform the press, as well as those of us watching on the TV news grabs, was that he was speaking as an individual – not the Prime Minister. Therefore he wasn’t apologising for the rise, merely expressing sorrow to us Davids out there.

Well, it appears that business may now be called by the moniker David. The business Davids may be the next in line for a non apology. Professor Mark Wooden, from the Melbourne Institute (sounds like a hotbed of socialists that), has taken to the PM with – pardon me – a wooden spoon. He is most upset over the treatment of his mate Jim, the AWA (hereafter Jim) and states that the government’s “fairness test” has “killed” him off:

Mark Wooden says the Prime Minister has killed off Jim - the Howard Government's individual employment contracts - by introducing a fairness test that prevented employers from cutting labour costs.

Professor Wooden, from the Melbourne Institute, said employers were "lining up" before the fairness test started in May because they could legally reduce pay and conditions.

But the advantage vanished, he said, when Mr Howard "rolled over"
to public pressure and guaranteed that penalty rates and other conditions could not be traded away without giving workers compensation.

The “advantage” vanished. Which advantage? Why the one that “legally” allowed employers to “reduce pay and conditions” of course. The one created by the raftof laws – unannounced during the ’04 campaign – that required no such “scuttling” safety net.

And it would appear that employers aren’t aware that Jim (and his advantage) is “dead” as they are still submitting agreements, at least fifty percent of which, would only pass pre “safety net”. Or, to put it in the words of Nick Minchin: the fairness test is having "teething troubles" as employers take time to understand their obligations. The question here is: how many are now in place that contravene this “safety net”, that is, that pre-date May?

Professor Wooden is really quite peeved at the PM’s pandering to popular politics. Not only that, he quite neatly skewers another ideological reason for these laws:

"AWAs are dead - he can say what he likes. You'll still get companies like Rio Tinto going for AWAs, but that will be for reasons other than cutting labour costs. They're using them to get rid of unions."

Ouch! Not in an election campaign Professor! If the good professor is looking for an apology from the PM he’ll have to accept one from the private individual like the rest of us.

The quoted article from the OZ finishes with the following paragraph:

Mr Howard introduced AWAs in his first group of workplace laws in 1997 with a "no disadvantage test" that meant workers could not be worse off than under
minimum awards. This test was abolished under Work Choices last year, then reinstated to some degree by the fairness test in May.

One would do well to remember it. You see, the “fairness test” was not ever required last year. There would be no further changes – they were not needed. The fact is, business does not believe it was needed and, as I’ve said before, you can bet your last dollar the PM doesn’t either. He never has; he stated so many times last year and when the laws were shoveled through Parliament in November ’05.

Should he win this election, I suspect that average working Davids, sometime not too long after – certainly before “well into the term”, will have a little sorrow directed his or her way. It will not be an apology, just an expression of regret or sorrow from a private individual at the passing of another Jim, Jim the “fairness test”.

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Minchin stuffs big, fat, pregnant cat back into bag

Following Prime Minister John Howard’s disavowal of a further wave of industrial relations reforms should his government be returned to office in the coming election, Finance Minister Nick Minchin has disavowed his avowed view of last year that a further wave of IR reforms is desirable.

As is well known, Senator Minchin touted the need for further IR reforms in a speech last year to the H.R. Nicholls Society. But now we can confidently rewrite history and confirm that he didn’t say it, he never did say it, and he never will say it — well, certainly not during the present election campaign.

This is important, indeed momentous, because Senator Minchin is a man with an uncanny sixth sense about what the voting public thinks, wants and feels.

Defending the convention that politicians may claim travel allowance on the election trail right up until their formal party launches, the Minister oraculated:

I think Australians understand they want to hear the political messages from both sides of politics and to do that you’ve got to get around the country.

Given the fuzziness of Senator Minchin’s avowals and disavowals, we can’t be sure whether this is actually a defence of that particular convention, or laying the groundwork for jettisoning yet another convention.

We can only anticipate with bated breath further communiqués from this enigmatic articulator of the zeitgeist.

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Howard stuffs big, fat, pregnant cat back in bag

“Some people will believe us, some people won’t, that always applies in election campaigns, but we do not have any plans to further change the industrial relations system.”

• Prime Minister John Howard

One wonders if those who “will believe” will be the same people who believed the PM’s non-pledge in the 2004 campaign not to introduce a further wave of industrial relations “reforms” that became known as WorkChoices.

Or maybe those who “will believe” will be the same people who believed the PM would act “in the national interest”, regardless of election non-pledges, by introducing a further wave of industrial relations reforms that became known as WorkChoices.

When Finance Minister Senator Nick Minchin told the H.R. Nicholls Society last year that a further wave of IR reforms — beyond WorkChoices — was needed, this was excused by Government spinmeisters as “a personal view” that was not necessarily representative of the Government’s thinking. That Minchin expressed “his” view as a prominent government front-bencher was apparently neither here nor there.

So, in the game of Alice-in-Wonderland croquet that is contemporary Australian politics, maybe Labor could “get away with” excusing Peter Garrett’s change-it-all gaffe — or non-gaffe, as the case may be — as merely expressing a “personal view” that was not necessarily representative of the Government-in-waiting’s thinking: “We are a broad church,” etc.

Incidentally... if Labor is “anti-jobs” because it opposes (or, at least, says it does) the Government’s IR platform, then is the Government “anti-jobs” because it introduced a “Fairness Test” as an antidote to the electoral poison of Australian Workplace Agreements?

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