From Peter Reith

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Turnbull calls for better quality in the public discourse. That could start with ABC radio. It put up unionist Dave Oliver and John Buchanan (a supporter of Labor's workplace system) to ridicule a perfectly sensible contribution to the public debate by Gina Rinehart.

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Rinehart made a number of comments that are irrefutable. Fortescue put off a thousand people last week and Xstrata announced another 600 job losses yesterday. She said Australia was becoming too uncompetitive. This is a statement of the accepted truth. It has been said by numerous business people for the past two years e.g. Jack Nasser, chair of BHP, and his CEO Marius Kloppers when announcing the deferral of Olympic Dam.

Nasser also noted the need for workplace relations reform. This is also a no-brainer as even the Government's own handpicked panel on IR admitted that the current provision for greenfield sites was a problem.

Recently the World Economic Forum ranking dropped Australia from 16 to 20 in one year - the biggest slide of any country. WEF also noted constraints on our infrastructure. BCA noted much higher labour costs in the resource sector and backed up the claim with a detailed study of comparable costs in the US. Rinehart mentioned labour rates in Africa - she did not advocate $2 wages in Australia. Her comment on statistics was immediately manipulated by the Treasurer and most of what she had to say was soon lost.

Turnbull's remarks were fitting to the Treasurer's response to Rinehart. Turnbull said:

In my view, all of this requires politicians to be especially careful to remember our responsibility to explain the big issues of our time. Dumbing down complex issues into sound bites, misrepresenting your or your opponent's policy does not respect "Struggle Street", it treats its residents with contempt.

The Honourable Peter Reith was a senior cabinet minister in the Australian government from 1996 to 2001 and then a director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development from 2003 to 2009. 

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Gus: the swine... Once again we've got to kick Peter in the budgies... Peter is still very eloquent in the same manner as he made us swallow (I did not, but the media did) the children overboard affair... I believe Peter is a pathological liar... or an ignoramus with dead panache, dedicated to make sure you earn far less than you do now. Take your pick. 

What Rinehart said, in her demure ingenue and likeable delivery, was a lot of codswallop...

And what Turnbull said was only a thin shadow of what Lindsay Tanner had already expressed a while back about hacks and politicians... It is also what we've said here on this site a long time ago, but from a perspective in which Tony Abbott has rotted the problem plenty more, by being deviously sneaky. That's why I call him "Detritus"...

The "sound bite", which many professional politicians indulge in, were perfected by Joh Bjelke-Petersen who most days in the afternoon went to "feed the chooks"... that is to say give the journalists a few titbits to feed upon, for the evening news... The next short-bullshit grab-master which we endured for too long was Rattus the First, John W Howard, who had all his one liners prefaced with "everyone knows that"... or "common sense tells us that " when the opposite was true... 

First and foremost Gina ferociously "does not believe" in global warming... This is the most vicious aspect of her persona.

Global warming is real... It has been scientifically proven over and over—  and we've clearly demonstrated it on this site. Thus for starters Rinehart's position is one hundred per cent wrong.

Gina makes money by selling carbon or carbon related minerals such as iron ore. One cannot make steel unless one has a large source of carbon for heat and for some of it becoming part of the steel... Cast iron has about 10 per cent carbon in it. Mild steel varies from 3 to 5 per cent.

I suspect that contemplating "investigating" global warming properly would create a "moral" (hip pocket) conflict for Gina... She'd rather be pontificating on the value of what she does and talk about reducing your salaries to zilch, with a smile...

Second, as she talks about the cost of employing people to do her business, she is very content to employ slaves... No two ways about it. Slaves would improve her large bottom-line substantially... And in all of Peter Reith's analysis, there is no mention that the small reduction in the mining business is presently due to a levelling out in the Chinese demand for raw stuff... Mind you, the trend in mining stocks is still going up, despite a few hiccups here and there, created by "short selling" rather than the real value of the mining...

Yes employing pernament slaves on super negative casual rates would be the ticket... and there'd be no need to look after them, or their family, once they've killed themselves working in your salt mines...

But Peter and the captains of industry — those who are at the wheels of mega businesses that post "record" profits in the vicinity of 15 billion dollars, year after year after year — always blame the workers and their wages (plus dues and taxes) for their drop in profits... Would it not be swell if we could extract the stuff at no cost, using unpaid slaves (apart from some thin gruel, like the "japs" did on the Burma railway line) and sell the mineral loot for an acceptable gold fortune — to line one pocket's with, pay no tax and enjoy the spoils... including a tax-free diesel... Yes miners do not pay much tax on the diesel they use...

Did the WEC (World Economic Forum) noted too that the standard of living is reasonably good in Australia — with Melbourne still topping the best city to live in, in the whole world?... All this of course compared with shanty towns in Africa where "slaves" are prepared to work for two bucks a day and some invigorating floggings?

All this fun, while remuneration for executive and CEOs in Australia have in the last few years GROWN by a factor of forty-fold compared to the remuneration of workers — and a hundred-fold compared to the basic wage?... What else do you want? A lollipop and a golden whip with that?... Hey! Give us a bit of relativity here...

On the future alone, the oncoming global warming should tell us to urgently revise our present way to do business, but not in the way those monkeys, like Reith, Turnbull and Gina, are trying to force us into — in which money is the only factor in the equation  — (their money) that is to take most of the slices of the cake for themselves, leaving the crumbs for the rest of us, as they destroy the planet... while making us believe via the media they control these crumbs are immense riches — including the media at our (their) ABC.... as proven by this dreadful article by Peter Reith...

We have to recognise this planet has boundaries and specific processes in which we impact grossly upon. We are destroying the naturalness of this planet at a rate of knots and it's time we include this destruction into our economical calculations — to arrest this damage as soon as possible...

Believe me, if we don't pay attention to the destruction we're doing, global warming will bite us in the bum...