WorkChoices - Based on Four Page Summary

It's great to see the impact of WorkChoices getting some much-deserved media coverage in the last week, given the high profile Spotlight case and the revelation that the sacking of the Cowra meatworkers was in fact legal under the new legislation. Today comes the news (via an FOI request by The Age) that the economic case for WorkChoices was based on a four page literature survey summarising sixteen articles about the legislation - many of which support the notion that WorkChoices would mean lower minimum wages. As Shadow Treasurer Wayne Swan says - someone with a laptop and Google could have whacked it together in five minutes.

Last year, when Labor urged the government to release its economic modelling for WorkChoices, it hoped to embarrass it by revealing that even its own modelling found no evidence of the productivity gains the Government were talking up. Instead, they found something far more intriguing - and embarrassing: that the government had in fact done no economic modelling whatsoever. This fact has now been confirmed by numerous Treasury sources. Treasury has now spoken vaguely about modelling in the future, which is a clever time to do it, given the legislation has already been passed and people are already feeling the impact.

Ah, WorkChoices - your choice and Buckley's. As John Howard, told us at such length during his Snowy Hydro pull out, unlike all the other nasty politicians, he listens to the people when they speak up about bad ideas. Except when he doesn't. Michelle Grattan continues on this theme, in regards to Telstra and nuclear power.