Jobs and the economy:
Les Heimann writes: Re. “Full-timers ditched but labour market holding on” (yesterday, item 1). Crikey seemed quite happy that we only lost 1200 jobs in December. But when will the commentariat wake up? We lost 44,000 full time jobs — we gained just on 43,000 part time jobs. This is good? It’s a bloody disaster.
These so called “part time” jobs are largely “casual” carrying with them absolutely no rights — no leave at all, no nothing — just “the right” to work on average five hour shift about three days a week.
A little investigation will demonstrate that all this is partly to counter the new workforce legislation as well as driving down costs — dramatically. Some simple arithmetic will show that an average “casual” 15 hour week at say $20 per hour — or $300 per week is less than a “full time” 38 hour week at say $18 per hour or — $684 per week. Multiply the shortfall — $384 by 38,000 and you get $14,592,000 a week. That’s $758,784,000 in a full year drop in consumer spending!
Meanwhile food costs increase, petrol still gushes dollars at the pump and housing costs. Who can afford to buy a house? Not on a casual wage of $300 a week! So rents increase. Who can afford rents? Not on a casual wage of $300 a week! The government looks toward a consumer led recovery whilst employers look to destroy consumers so as to maintain dividend levels. Then they can’t sell because the market is shrinking and dividends drop so more cost cutting, more job shedding.
This is a disaster happening people! Right in front of your blinded eyes. Much worse than a financial meltdown. This is a perfect storm in the making — a whole of economy downward spiralling meltdown of triple tsunami proportions. What sort of job will you hold this time next year?
John Carver writes: I want to suggest a campaign that Crikey can run to alert people to the pathetic nature of journalism in relation to the economic slowdown. I’ve been watching the reporting over the last few weeks and have been concerned by the blatant scare mongering being employed by journalists and their editors. I think you did a piece on the overuse of “recession” and I think this is further evidence of an irresponsible campaign of fear. As a case in point, contrast yesterday’s report in The Age on unemployment with its report on house prices.
The headline reads “Massive drop in full-time jobs“. The article talks about a loss of 44, 000 jobs to a new full time figure of 7,640,200. That is a 0.57% drop. Even the most excitable amongst us would hardly call a 0.57% increase in our salary “massive”. In the same article is a paragraph that reads “The Australian dollar lost as much as a quarter of a US cent to 65.76 US cents after the numbers were published, but climbed back to near 66 US cents around noon.” In my view that sentence should read “The Australian dollar reacted momentarily but recovered.” Hardly any attention is paid to the increase in the number of employed people, even though the percentage increase is almost three times as high as the drop in full time jobs.
In their other article “House sale prices head north, west“, although the increases talked about are 6%, the word “substantial” is preferred to “massive”. In fact a comment: “More first-home buyers signed on the dotted line for mortgages in November than in any of the 12 months previous…” attracts no emotion whatsoever! I find this biased doom saying to be outrageous and hope you do also!
Duncan Riley writes: While it’s always interesting reading about Australia’s struggling job market, the data given in Crikey‘s article yesterday quoted newspaper job advertisements; the question though is why? New Ltd in particular (Fairfax is somewhat better) still gives primacy to newspaper job advertisements in reports on job advertising numbers, but with little justification.
The number of job advertisements in newspapers in December (on a weekly average) total 10,100 vs. 190,661 for print and online combined. My maths may be a little rusty, but print came out at 5.3% of total job ads. Reputable organisations wouldn’t report a drop in sales for Subaru (6.4% market share, Nov 08) as being somehow important or representative of the entire car market, so why is Crikey, News Ltd and others even bothering to mention a drop in newspaper ads, let alone ahead of the overall figure and/or ahead of online job numbers?
Of all outlets, I would have thought Crikey would know better.
Spinning the Gaza conflict:
Daniel Lewis writes: Re. “The Aussies spinning the Gaza conflict” (yesterday, item 9). Greg Barns suggests of Israel’s Australian born spokesmen, “If these Australians were members of, or spokespeople for say Hamas, or the Iran or Syria, the media in this country would have a field day in running front page headlines like ‘Aussie terror fighters’…” and therefore, as spokesmen for Israel, they should be “subjected to the same scrutiny”.
It’s obvious Greg Barns can’t draw any distinction between a democratic liberal democracy (Israel) who is a friend of Australia, and an Islamist theocratic terror-state (Hamas). I wonder if Barns also believes Martin Indyk or Crown Princess Mary should be “subjected to the same scrutiny” as, say, David Hicks or Mamdouh Habib.
Newsflash, Barns: Subject them to all the scrutiny you want (as you already have I might add). You’ll find, unlike Hamas, they do not support the death of Jews, suicide bombing or the deliberate murder of children. I would love to read your “scrutiny” of Hamas…
Ashley Midalia writes: Is Greg Barns serious that working for the Israeli government is equivalent to working for Hamas, Iran or Syria? His argument is based on the premise that civilians have been killed in Israel’s war against Hamas. But, by that logic, would working for the United States government, which has arguably caused the deaths of 100,000+ civilians in Iraq, be the same as working for Saddam Hussein or al-Qaeda, Greg?
When will Israel be recognised for what it is — a genuinely democratic and pluralistic nation-state, just like the US, the United Kingdom (which has caused more than its share of civilian deaths in occupied territories over the years) or Australia (which, of course, avoided being an occupying force by effectively wiping out or marginalising the indigenous population before you could say “genocide”)?
The manipulation of credit spreads:
Stephen Matthews writes: Re. “Media players muddy the waters in ASIC rumourtrage crackdown” (yesterday, item 2). I’m pleased to see amongst the voluminous Crikey coverage of the bit parts played by the media that you have hit upon the real sleeper … the manipulation of credit spreads. The market in credit default swaps — based as it is on placing bets on the likelihood of a corporate collapse — has spawned the sort of weapons of wealth destruction that Buffett warned us about. And that was years ago.
Until recent times the hedge funds have been building their equity derivative strategies around manipulation of the CDS market (you sell Macquarie CDSs at x at 2pm, I offer them at x+ 15 points at 2.05pm, you reoffer at x+ 25 points two minutes later, I start a few insinuations around the dopey stockbrokers like ”have you seen the movement in those Macquarie CDSs spreads … They’re going out of business mate” and we clean up on our short Macquarie equity positions by 2.30pm] and all of it under the noses of the authorities.
If the government levied a punitive tax on CDS premiums … much of this coercive behaviour would be eliminated.
The climate change lobby:
Stephen Magee writes: Re. “King tides and killer sharks: Summer’s media beat-ups” (yesterday, item 15). Stuart Nettle’s berating of the media for the king tide beat-up is totally misplaced. The fault lies entirely with the climate change lobby. It was the NSW Department of the Environment which began pushing the line that the king tide would effectively be a foretaste of sea level rises caused by climate change.
A Department spokesperson gave out the same line when interviewed on Radio National hours before the tide was to peak, how long can the climate change loonies get away with this? They continually made wild predictions and then simply walk away when the predictions don’t come true (viz the subtle rebranding from “global warming” to “climate change” in the face of falling temperatures).
If nothing else, the king tide fiasco shows how little trust any sane person would place in their modelling: if they completely over-estimate the effect of a king tide only hours before it happens, why would anyone believe their predictions of climate events 10, 20 or 50 years away?
Conroy’s Rabbit-Proof Firewall:
Verity Pravda writes: Re. “Another nail in the coffin of Conroy’s Rabbit-Proof Firewall” (yesterday, item 11). I heartily agree that the policy is being handled atrociously. But Stilgherrian continually misrepresents what is proposed. Nothing about the filter is about the threat to children from being entrapped on line. The “protection of children” the Minister talks about is the protection of children from the original acts subject of the images, and he is taking every action he can to stem trade in the images, including boosting AFP resources and international co-operation.
It is the functional equivalent of protecting elephants from poaching by banning the trade in ivory. It doesn’t mean you don’t also have programs to catch poachers. But you sure as heck don’t put up a special entrance way at your ports saying “if you have potentially illegal items please enter here”. And at this point all the Minister is asking is that ISPs try blocking access to the websites and tell him how it works — that looks like real evidence based policy rather than just one person saying “it doesn’t work”.
By the way, saying something more than once doesn’t make it true. And exactly why is Crikey providing his rants? Since when has Crikey been a paragon of a complete libertarian view on content? Goodness me only yesterday Stephen Mayne seemed to be promoting ASIC’s investigation of those Packer stories and — horror — quite calm about the idea of the journalist being forced to reveal their sources.
Somehow I thought that was on the taboo list.
The decline of print:
Nick Place writes: Re. “Print classifieds: A case for euthanasia” (yesterday, item 17). I think the real loser in Geoff Jennings’ touching piece is not so much Fairfax as Jimmy the dog.
Who is this Stilgherrian?:
Stilgherrian writes: “Who is this ‘Stilgherrian’?” asks Telstra flack Rob Bruem (yesterday, comments). Too funny, Rod! I don’t know about you guys over at Telstra, but here at Crikey we’ve got the internet. There’s this “Google” thing which we use to look up stuff. Apparently at Telstra you have “Sensis” instead, but even Sensis uses Google now. It takes just seconds to find an entire website about me, including a page called About Stilgherrian.
You can read about me and cows and gin and my geeky computing science background and my broadcasting career. There are photos too, including one of me with a bare-breasted garden gnome, and info about pretty much everything else in my world apart from my secret life as a goat dominatrix. Google says I’m on lots and lots of other websites too. I’ve even got a Facebook page!
The fantastic thing about Google is that even if you misspell my name like you did, Rod — don’t you have copy and paste at Telstra? — the first thing it says is “Did you mean: stilgherrian”. Clever, eh? If you use Sensis, you might not find my website straight away, ‘cos Sensis defaults to Australian pages only and my website is hosted in the US. It’s much cheaper there. Why is that, Rod?
“Why do you let him post reports on Crikey anonymously?” Well, Rod, if you’d done the Google thing, you’d have discovered that “Stilgherrian” is my real, actual legal name — like on my passport and Medicare card and the electoral roll and the endless bills and all those nasty letters I keep getting from the bank. I’m even in the phone book. Is the phone book a Telstra thing, Rod? If Telstra can still afford an intranet, you’ll find that I was a contractor to your marketing department a while back, and I’m currently trialling your rather nifty Next G mobile broadband network.
Look, I know it’s all very unusual, Rod, what with just a given name and no surname n’all, so maybe that’s enough of a challenge for this week? Or was there something you wanted to ask or say about the content of Monday’s article? What was it about again? Oh yeah. Telstra and the internet.
Didn’t you like it, Rod?
Send your comments, corrections, clarifications and c*ck-ups to boss@crikey.com.au. Preference will be given to comments that are short and succinct: maximum length is 200 words (we reserve the right to edit comments for length). Please include your full name — we won’t publish comments anonymously unless there is a very good reason.
hey remember when peter faris called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the “leader of iran”
lmao
Absolutely Ashley. The coalition of killers drop phosphorous bombs, napalm, cluster bombs and mothers of all bombs on sleeeping civilians and massacres hundreds of thousands of them while whining about suicide bombers that kill a few.
Here’s another newsflash. Israel is not a pluralistic democracy it is a facist state run by facist settlers from the former Eastern communist block and Russia. They have just banned all arab blocs from the elections, arabs are 4th class citizens and they have never elected a government with a majority of anything.
As for us. Britain committed genocide in every place it settled – as the Canadian Inuit, the American Indians, the Maori, the aborigines, the Rhodesians and others from one corner of the world to the other.
Does that excuse 60 years of genocidal mania by the so-called nation of Israel? I don’t think so.
Israel were offered 56% of historic Palestine in an illegal vote because the lying British had locked them out of negotiations in 1919. Imagine if they tried to give 56% of us to Tibet because of chinese crimes.
Would we sit around and take it. And Daniel. fuck off.
Try and tell anyone that attacking this population is not terrorism Daniel.
“Especially since the imposition of the stricter blockade of the last 18 months, Gaza has come to resemble an open-air prison where a million-and-a-half virtual inmates, cut off from the rest of the world, struggle to piece together an existence.
The effect of the blockade on the health of the population of Gaza has been severe in the extreme. In the period before the new outbreak of violence a couple of weeks ago, investigators found that 75 percent of Gazans were undernourished. The children of Gaza, who number 58 percent of the population and whose bodies persist in wanting to grow, have been the greatest sufferers: 46 percent suffer from acute anemia, 45 percent have an iron deficiency, and 18 percent have been stunted in their growth. Because of lack of fuel, provision of electricity and water has been sketchy and scarce. And now, since the assault by Israel, beginning on December 27, the condition of Gaza has gone from calamitous to catastrophic: a humanitarian disaster, in the view of both the International Red Cross and the United Nations Relief Agency, who have a certain expertise in these matters.
Verity Pravda is inadvertantly excusing Minister Conroy’s wll publicised insults (along with the libels of the jet-setting ChildWise CEO) that anyone opposing his non-workable filter is advocating child porn but ignores the other troublesome paragraphs in the bill that alows the government to filter out other sites it chooses as well as handing that power also to bodies like the AFP who have shown they simpy can’t be trusted in a pink fit to even obey the laws ( Dr Haneef ?). Moreover our new lilly livered AG has shown when the AFP are busted doing wrong that same AG bizarrely describes his job as “protecting the Commonwealth” rather than ensuring the law is correctly enforced.
Lets be clear-child porn is the new catch-all banner that is hystericaly used to silence critics and the same old lies are rolled out time and time again. Interpol’s website clearly states that 85% illicit child porn repeatedly discovered is anything up to 50 years old and is being re-cycled over and over by a bunch of crims yet the AFP manages to garner milions to “save the kiddies”, most who are now baby-bomers but meanwhile as just NSW DOCs alone reports, there is an increase of over 4000 reported abuse case just over the Christmas holiday period alone. That means real live children being physicaly and mentally harmed today who will never have the easy life of ChildWise’s Bernadette McMenanin who flits about Asia in first class or of sanctamonious AFP plods who pretend they are “saving the kiddies”. Conroy needs to understand he is being had by the federal plods who are more concerned with building a power base (and who can blame when they see it’s so easy ?) or the self-appoined NGOs who hog the media limelight even as thousands of Australian kids are abused daily and ignored.
Ah, delicious irony! The bitter taste of shame! I mis-typed Rod Bruem’s name the first time I used it here today. I guess we’re even now, Rod. [hides]