(Above: yes it all went wrong in 1834 with the arrival of the Tolpuddle martyrs in Australia as convicts, and the tripe talked about the right of general association, and it's never been any good since then. Such a bright start to the age of enlightenment in 1750 but it only lasted 84 years. Just look at the ruffians).
It's in the nature of the world that sometimes the apocalyptic loon gets it right, though rarely for the right reasons. Faced with impending disaster, the world usually marches on, straight down the gurgler.
It wasn't within the imagination of the French nobility to imagine the French revolution, so abrupt, sudden and hideous was the transformation of their world, while the average Edwardian, contemplating a bucolic life, had no idea of the transforming effect of the carnage of World War 1 - even though the world had been busy for decades preparing the means for that carnage.
In a similar way, very few understood that World War 11 would match the first world war for brutality and carnage, with much improved killing technology, much better military strategies and an encompassing attitude to the destruction of civilians as collateral damage. Well progress is progress.
So okay the apocalypse will always catch up with us, and someday soon most likely. But what is it about people who yearn for the apocalypse, and preferably by tomorrow? This isn't a party political thing, because lefties and greenies expect - by way of punishment - that gaia will strike back and punish us all, and pretty soon at that, so we must be good and eat our broccoli, or else.
But it's also a way of looking at the world that infests right wingers and fundamentalists. It's almost as - if because of ideology or theology - the world should be punished and the rapture kick in and the sooner the better. Because if the world's failed to conform to the appropriate ideology or theology, and so being judged impure, it should be doomed.
Worse still, if a moderate keeps the world ticking over, then it's not a world the immoderate would want to inhabit.
I say all this as a preamble to Janet Albrechtsen's latest missive Rhetoric fails to tell the whole story, which positively yearns for failure. Of business, of Australian economy, of anything you've got, at least if you come from the wrong side of the political tracks. So she starts like this:
Ironically, the Rudd government’s Fair Work laws may have the same effect, though in a much quieter, slower way. While Work Choices was a short fuse - once lit, it didn’t take long to explode - Fair Work looks like being a long, slow burn. But in time, as its effects slowly grow more obvious and more drastic, perhaps it will deliver just as big a bang.
Increasingly, Fair Work appears to represent a dramatic overreach. And though the business community has been slow to react and even slower to pick fights with a government known to be vindictive, it seems the full horror of the new regime is starting to dawn on it. Even worse, workers will end up bearing the brunt of Labor’s IR hubris.
Oh where are you now my blue eyed son, what did you see my darling young one, because a hard, hard, hard rain is gonna fall.
So somehow Albrechtsen manages to get from the restaurant game - for which Julia Gillard introduced exemptions specific to the business - to Cochlear, which is indignant that it might have to sit down with the unions because 57% of their workers expressed a desire to bargain collectively.
Well that's sent the CEO of Cochlear, Chris Roberts, into a fair old lather:
Roberts is most scathing about the government’s empty productivity rhetoric. There is, he says, “no immutable law that links collective bargaining with productivity” and he was amazed at the paucity of data to support the government’s proposition. “The fundamental basis of this IR legislation is false. We moved into the age of enlightenment 259 years ago - if you consider 1750 as the dawn of the age of reasoning and logic - and we shouldn’t walk away from evidence.”
Well I hope his labor relations skills are better than his sense of history. You might date the age of enlightenment from the American Declaration of Independence, the United States Bill of Rights, or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, but none of these will give you the date of 1750 (not to mention a certain anxiety about excluding the Greeks, the Romans, Shakespeare and the Renaissance).
Worse still, of course, the eighteenth century saw the drive towards unions, and even Adam Smith had a thing to say about all that:
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combination of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate.
When workers combine, masters ... never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, laborers, and journeymen.
If Cochlear had taken care of its workers, while boasting about its massive growth and its increasing profits, and its hubris at being at the forefront of technology in Australia, maybe it wouldn't have scored a vote of 57% when its workers sat down to consider the current state of play.
Well Roberts says Cochlear is paying well above award, but as a result demanding leaner, more flexible operations to enhance productivity. Golly, will this enhance productivity mean that one day there'll come a time one human and a dozen robots can do the entire workload?
One thing's for sure - if Roberts thinks conducting labor relationships through the press, and in particular through the apocalyptic world view of Janet Albrechsten, apocalypse might just be what he gets.
It's just a union, not the anti-Christ. But soft, hush now, because Satan approaches and the bomb is lit, and soon it will explode:
On the evidence to date, Fair Work is not the softly, safely set of IR reforms promised by then economic conservative Kevin Rudd when he was seeking office. In fact, Gillard’s reforms have restored an adversarial culture she has the temerity to claim is holding back productivity. With the country’s most militant unions already on the warpath, it is only early days for this potentially long-fuse time bomb.
Oh yes, bring it on. Collapse and doom and gloom and failure and companies fleeing offshore. Sweep the socialists from office, and bring in ... Malcolm Turnbull, hard core republican and patrician?
Hold on, wait a second, after pocketing government money, haven't the likes of Pacific Brands have already gone offshore, taking their Bonds and King Gee with them? Well I can see Malcolm taking a firm John Howard approach - how much do you want? Got wheat to sell? What's the cost of the trucking?
So if it's all doom and gloom, let Cochlear rush off to China to hire a decent factory to do the job at rice wages.
Because I for one will at last be able to afford a cheap rip of their technology, which will last at least one year (or until warranty expires), and match by very favorite Swiss watch, obtained for US twenty bucks on the streets of Chinatown in New York. That's ten thousand bucks to you and Malcolm Turnbull, but hey it's lasted me a year, well above the zero day warranty it came with.
Meanwhile, the destructive workers and their ill-mannered union can contemplate life on the streets, or working for Chinese factory wages.
Yes let's show everybody every which way to head towards destruction instead of sane, moderate negotiation. Ideology is everything, and if you don't believe that, you're being bloody ideological.
Would Albrechtsen be satisfied by anything less than the abolition of all unions? The abolition of people who disagree with her? The abolition of a world that doesn't work the precise way she thinks it should?
Well I'm sure getting rid of the unions would surely be a satisfying apocalypse for her, but I'm not so sure Australia would travel along with her, not when they flinched from John Howard's work choices.
Not even if it meant going back to the age of enlightenment, whenever that might have started, and discovering that the right to collective bargaining had something going for it ... at least if it meant negotiating a contract with a huge impersonal employer determined to screw you into the ground, and would because they could.
But by golly Albrechtsen did her job well, with the comments page frothing and foaming, waxing and waning, just like her column. It's a living (and no unions involved please!) Me, I went a little mad, getting worried about when the age of enlightenment actually started, and when the ticking bomb might go off. 24 crossed with Broken Arrow.
Fun, but the meaning of life? Take it away Bobby Zimmerman:
Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin',
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
(Below: I'm told that in 1750 in England it was the highest point of the rococo style, and there was a striking decrease in the size of the hoops, but never fear the hoop would return. You can never ban a good thing. And so began the age of enlightenment. By golly I think I'm ready to write the latest update of 1066 and all that).
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