A Bad Day for Johnny

John Howard was looking distinctly uneasy in Parliament today, and his line that Kim Beazley's decision to abolish AWAs would soon be seen as his equivalent to Mark Latham's pledge to get troops out of Iraq by Christmas found very little traction. Instead (and stunts notwithstanding), there seemed to be a new vitality in the Opposition, given that Beazley has finally realised what so many of us have been saying for months: that industrial relations needs to be the cornerstone of the Opposition's election campaign, because the issue is biting. The government has repeatedly failed to justify the economic case for WorkChoices (today it was revealed that the government's own preferred lawyer, Freehills, has found that wages are growing more quickly under collective agreements than AWAs), and the supply of angry workers who have either been sacked or had their conditions slashed under the new regime continues to grow.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister's push for harsher treatment of asylum seekers has hit a rough patch, with both Upper and Lower house Coalition members, including Petro Georgiou, Judith Troeth, Judi Moylan and Barnaby Joyce strongly hinting that they could cross the floor on the issue, given that the government's own Senate Enquiry found that the proposed measures would require such severe revision that it would be barely worth going through with the legislation.

But then, the government did manage to put the final kybosh on homosexual civil unions in the ACT, following the unprecedented step of both the ACT Attorney General, Simon Cowell, and Federal Attorney General Philip Ruddock dropping by the official residence to get the Governor General to intervene.

Thus, our country will not be over-run by underemployed asylum seekers who are also in a civil union with their same-sex partners. So it wasn't a whole day wasted.