| Tuesday Ongoing Report (October 2) |
| Sunday, 07 October 2007 | |||||||||||||||||||||
Page 8 of 11 Updated 3:00pm: Just found a couple of articles on the Burmese uprising. Thought this was quite distressing - "Hla Win, the defecting chief of the military junta's intelligence operations, that thousands of monks have been executed in recent days and their bodies dumped in the jungle." The articles are here and here. Earlieir (1:50pm): First up we have the release of a new study into AWAs and their effects on workers. Partly funded by the Australian Research Council and Unions NSW it found that, on average, workers on AWAs take home $106 less than their counterparts on collective agreements and spend an extra hour at work each week. The Age's original article is here. Both the Herald and the Age have this story, or something related to it as the top story on their respective websites. With News Ltd, however, you need to go digging deep on the news.com.au site to actually find any reference to it (it's in the Business section as of 1:52PM). This is despite the fact that Howard and his some of his ministers have even criticised it today. One has to wonder how long News Ltd can keep up this obvious bias as far as selective reporting and over-hyping of anti-Labor stories before someone else in the media will pick them up on it. On this point, we will soon be launching a bias tracker section of this site, which will index and tally up the frontpage articles of every paper in this country to keep tabs on the proportion of articles which are pro-Coalition, pro-ALP and objective. More on this later. E-mail me if you are interested in taking part - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Back to the Workchoices study. Costello said that it was "contaminated" and "lacked credibility because it was funded by unions who want a change of government". Joe Hockey weighed in and described the authors as "union-friendly academics who have previously done a lot of work for the ACTU". In response, (quoting from this Herald article ) Dr van Wanrooy said she had only once before been involved in research with any union association, in 2001 - "Prior to that, I spent two years working at the Department of Workplace Relations under minister [Peter] Reith and Minister [Tony] Abbott." She also defended the study's credibility, stating that to gain ARC funding required the research methods to be scrutinised by a panel of experts. Co-author John Buchanan responded - "[Mr Hockey] has made some very serious allegations about me and my team being union bosses in disguise masquerading as academics." One wonders how effective all this union scare-mongering actually helps the government's position in any way. Hockey (and the rest of the Coalition) risk being seen as crying wolf If they scream union stooges every time a negative study, report or criticism is made relating to WorkChoices. People haven't been buying that line all year - why do they persist? Next up, we have the release of a climate change report by the CSIRO. Interesting to see this reported prominently on news.com.au unlike the Workchoices study. I wonder if that has anything to do with Murdoch's change of heart on the issue, and claim that he will "subtly introducing [the climate issue] into our content.". According to the report "AUSTRALIANS have been warned to brace for catastrophic heatwaves, bushfires, drought and severe water shortages as climate change causes widespread havoc" and furthermore:
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