Work Choices
@letter =What rock was Nick Everett hiding under during last year's federal election? (Write On, GLW #761) You couldn't move without a Labor political hopeful promising to "tear-up" Work Choices through the campaign. Rudd promised it in the campaign launch — he even reiterated it after his election victory in the face of Coalition plans to block legislation. "The Labor Party has a mandate to tear up Work Choices", Rudd said on November 27.
However, as readers of GLW will know, this promise was a complete lie. From the adoption of Labor's "Forward with Fairness" IR policy at its April 2007 national conference, up until now, GLW has continued to expose the hypocrisy of the Labor government — promising to "tear-up" Work Choices on the one hand, while keeping most of its provisions on the other.
Everett is wrong to let the ALP off the hook. It was the ALP that created the impression that they would restore workers' rights. And to back up that impression they have made one concrete reform: the abolition of Australian Workplace
Agreements, albeit allowing that mandatory flexibility clauses will restore them via the back door.
The Your Rights at Work campaign had many flaws — none of which were denied by GLW — that consistently gave voice to left critics of the ACTU leadership from within the union movement. However, to write off a campaign that organised the largest mobilisations of workers in Australian history as "always a re-elect Labor campaign" as Everett does, is unsupportable.
The struggle remains to build a trade union leadership in Australia that is independent of the major political parties, which places the struggle for workers' rights first, second and last. It's a struggle that GLW is committed to supporting. The campaign to defeat Work Choices, and the Howard government that spawned it, was an important step, but must go much further.
Graham Matthews
Liverpool, NSW
Pay rise not enough
Raising the WA teachers' salaries, though long overdue, will not of itself make teachers return to the classrooms. Assaults, disrupted classes, constant insults and aggro from students, teacher burnout and low scholastic levels, are symptomatic of something much more urgent and in need of reform.
Put briefly, it is that teachers cannot be expected to teach and to exercise crowd control at the same time. We therefore need to:
1. instal a time-out room with a special, full-time supervisor in each school. Students disrupting a class are sent
immediately to time-out. If they continue to disrupt, their parents are phoned at work and asked to collect the student.
2. Secondary education should no longer be compulsory. It is criminal that young men and women should not be allowed to work and earn a wage if they want to.
3. All teachers should be recruited directly by the school. Since funds are allocated by the number of students a school has, reforms will be fast and far reaching.
Do this and our schools will again attract the professionals we need so badly to educate the next generation of young Australians.
Peter Gilet
Albany, WA
Lake Argyle mega-city
Where are the politicians with a vision for the future? Instead of arguing about whether you can bring water from the Kimberley we should be planning a mega city beside Lake Argyle and bringing the people to the water.
Given that our problems in education, health and law and order are largely a reflection of the massive population growth in Perth, it makes sense to have a truly visionary approach and populate our north-west. With global warming set to worsen Perth's water and energy needs it is a no-brainer to move north where there is unlimited water and energy.
Add to this the ridiculous fly-in fly-out miners who are adding to global warming instead of being located near to their workplace and we have a real incentive to change. There is plenty of land and water to grow food without the imposition of a carbon tax to transport it all the way to Perth.
Even the Liberal Party backers who are demanding more pens in the Swan River for their megavessels could have as many boats as they desired in Lake Argyle, which is 10 times bigger than Sydney Harbour.
Dr Colin Hughes
Swan View, WA
Desalination plant a waste of energy
The NSW government's decision to go ahead with the massively expensive desalination plant at Kurnell is more about being seen to be doing something than shifting to a more sustainable use of water.
For the estimated $2 billion the plant will cost — coming from our pockets — it could fund water tanks across the whole of Sydney. Instead, the plant will provide just 13-15% of Sydney's drinking water — and for only about 10 years before the plant will require significant refurbishment due to corrosion.
The Sydney Coastal Councils group believes that desalination is no substitute for good water saving practices, nor would it effectively "drought proof" Sydney. It says that restrictions, in combination with other water conservation and water supply options, are key aspects of effective drought management.
Planning minister Frank Sartor protests that the plant will be fuelled by "green" wind power. But if a wind farm can be built to generate the necessary energy for the plant, why can't the Iemma government begin the bigger, and necessary, shift to renewables for all our power? Instead, it is backing coal-based energy, by trying to privatise the NSW electricity industry.
Howard Byrnes
Tempe, NSW