Tuesday 30th of April 2024
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vocational dollars...

joycesmillions

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has brushed aside Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce's calls for his salary to be tripled to $1 million.

Yesterday the Government accepted a remuneration tribunal recommendation to give federal politicians a 3 per cent pay rise.

The Greens say it should be rejected because lowest paid workers are not getting an increase.

But Senator Joyce says politicians should be paid as much as business leaders.

"I'm just stating the commercial reality that we must make sure that the highest office holder in our land should be within sight of the sort of money that they get in the marketplace for running a comparable sized company," he said.

"If you pay people nothing you'd still fill parliament up but you'd fill it up with the sort of people that don't represent what you want."

Asked about the pay rise and Senator Joyce's comments in Pittsburgh, Mr Rudd was not inclined to agree.

"You know what all of the conditions of employment are when you stick your hand up for this job," Mr Rudd told reporters after a speech at the Carnegie Mellon University in the US city.

"And A, the working hours and B, the extended privileges spending so much time with you guys, and C, remuneration etc, I think that's all just fine."

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vocational dollars... Pay peanuts get monkeys... Pay 10 times the amount of peanuts get ten times the amount of monkeys...


agreable amendments...

Speaking from London earlier this week Mr Turnbull said he believed the party room would be able to agree on amendments.

hand shakes....

WHERE IS OUR KEV?

most likely the video is a fake or mislabelled as G20...

the capitalist trousers...

From Bob Ellis

...

Everyone hates its inequities and its disproportionate rewards and punishments (why sack anyone who has done good work for 20 years? Why pay anyone millions for doing harm? Why?), except the wealthy few at the top of the dung-hill crowing look at me, look at me, I'm earning $50 a minute, waking and sleeping, and next year I'll be earning 60. Look at me.

Or perhaps you disagree. Perhaps you think the 100 children who have died of AIDS and cholera and bad water since you started reading this piece are a fair price to pay for the profit margin of Qantas, now plummeting, and the $194 in interest Sol Trujillo will get every hour (waking and sleeping) for the rest of his greedy, grubby, neurotic, incompetent shambles of a life.

Or perhaps you think it's the best system there is; a system to which there is no alternative. Swedish social democracy? Forget it. Scottish social democracy? No chance. Canadian social democracy? No way. The Bhutan happiness-measurement system? You must be kidding.

All are inferior to global capitalism which sells cigarettes to 14-year-olds and takes 42 years to kill them, on average, with cancer and emphysema and charges them $256,000 (on average) for the intermittent comfort of their shameful, mortal addiction.

One of my solutions, and there are many (rent controls, protectionism, limiting the cost of advertising and the number of outlets Wal-Mart and McDonalds can have , hot rocks, green cars, subsidised country colleges of jazz, in any American state, refusing wages, food and shelter to all Friedmanite economists for the rest of their lives) is to pass a law that no company executive can earn any more than four times the wage of the President of the United States.

Can there be any argument against this?

Just asking.

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The Capitalism Delusion by Bob Ellis, released on 28 September 2009. Read more of Bob Ellis at Unleashed.