Polls Show Abbott On Track, But He May Escape Before The Train Arrives!

Ok, the front page isn’t real. Apparently, there’s a “Daily Telegraph” Headline generator, and I got that one by selecting random. Here’s another random one:

See, you do have to explain that it’s not an actual headline. Particularly with Andrew Bolt’s “if we don’t stop the boats the carbon tax could make a comeback” in the red bit at the top!

But unlike the headline generator, there have been some things in the media recently that I’d be tempted to condemn as improbable were it not for the fact that they’re real.

I read somewhere recently that Abbott had a jump in his approval rating of three percent!

Let’s not quibble about the fact that 3% is still within the margin of error. Or even the fact that the ABC has taken to mentioning the 3% margin of error every time a poll favours Labor, but failing to mention this when the polls favour the Liberals.

No, let’s just accept the fact that – according to the poll being quoted – there are now 28% of people in Australia who think that Tony is doing a good or very good job. Which is slightly higher than the number of Australians considered overweight, but lower than the number of Australians “freelancing” in the workforce.

But hey, his polls are on the rise. And why wouldn’t they be? I mean, he’s hardly been in the news lately. Now, I’m not repeating any insider leaking here – though surely Liberal strategists must have noticed it – whenever Abbott disappears from the news for a while, their poll numbers go up. Like the Christmas break. Or when the Liberals make absolutely no new policy announcements. Actually, it’d probably help if they made no announcements of any kind.

Like when Joe Hockey steps up and, without even announcing a government initiative to reduce the “mess left by Labor”, enlighten us with some of his homespun wisdom with suggestions like the poor don’t have to worry about an increase in the GST because, after we’ve finished with them, they won’t have any money to spend anyway. (No, he didn’t actually say that. Like “The Daily Telegraph” headline, I feel that I have to let you know that it’s not actually real!)

Which brings me to penalty rates. Apparently, there’s a couple of posters (see example below) being distributed by a business group where businesses can either post that they’d like to be open, but due to the high cost of penalty rates they can’t, or – if they are open – they can tell us that they’d like to employ more staff, but due to the high cost of penalty rates they can’t.

Not that I’d encourage graffiti but if I saw one on an actual business, I’d be tempted to write on it, I’d like to eat/shop here but due to the cut in my wages recently, I can’t afford it.

The issue of penalty rates is probably worth a long discussion. But hey, let’s simplify it to “Higher wages = less employment”, which one only has to pursue to its logical conclusion to see that it’s absurd. If employers could get people to work for nothing, most would go out of business because they’d have so few customers. The question becomes one of finding an equilibrium point.

Simply asserting that some businesses don’t find it worth opening on a Sunday doesn’t really do much for the debate. I’m sure many businesses wouldn’t find it financially viable to open till 2am, but it’s not solely due to penalty rates. As someone suggested, we should all write to Liberal MPs suggesting that we rang their office to support the idea that everyone should be open seven days a week, but for some reason, it seemed to be closed on the weekend.

And, of course, if penalty rates were removed in some industries, you can already predict the complaints about there be a shortage of workers because people don’t want to work unsociable hours when they can get just as much working more civilised hours. “Choosing when you want to work? People shouldn’t be allowed to do that they should be available 24//7!”

Ah, WorkChoices “dead, buried and cremated! Though not in that order one presumes…

Ok, one more to finish.

Mm, there’s a whole new parlour game. Generate a whole lot of these and people have to compare them to real front pages and pick which is real. Hours of fun for the whole family.

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