You’ll notice in the video, Mr Turnbull making his position on penalty rates very… ah, clear. Well, that is to say…ah, we’re in no doubt that he supports…flexibility. Turnbull on penalty rates
And we can sure of his support for flexibility because if there’s one thing we can say about his time as PM, it’s how flexible he’s been. If being a contortionist was an Olympic sport, he’d be a gold medal chance. He supports the Republic, not until the Queen dies; he’s all for marriage equality but only after we have a plebiscite and then he’ll allow a vote in Parliament; he supports action on climate change, but nothing that would affect anyone’s business interests; he doesn’t support subsidising renewables because the market should decide, but wouldn’t it be just peachy to lend that big coal money a billion dollars interest free; he supports saying whatever you need to say to get elected, but wants the Federal Police called in because “Mediscare” was a fraud!
So it was pleasing to hear him talk about flexibility. Now I know that some of you will think that’s just a euphemism for “how can we screw workers even more?”, but I’m sure that you’ll find that flexibility is a two-way street. For example, in return for giving up their penalty rates, some workers will get to work more hours. Or, after telling their boss that they need to have a day off to look after a sick child, some workers will find that their employer is so understanding that he tells them not to come in again and that they can spend the rest of their life as a stay-at-home parent.
Yes, flexibility. It – and innovation – is the way of the future. And in return for all that flexibility, the workers will have jobs and the economy will have growth and the Liberals will be able to pay down all that debt just like they promised… Which wasn’t a lie, because they fully intended to have the Budget back in surplus but they didn’t realise that their plan had a few holes in it. I know some of you have rather unkindly suggested that they had no plan, but they had a very clear one:
Get elected, hope that the economy improves because the adults are back in charge, cut spending on anything that they couldn’t link to defence and sell Medibank Private, Australia Post and the ABC. Any suggestion that they wanted to privatise Medicare was just a Labor lie, in spite of Mr Turnbull’s response in February, 2016, to a question in Parliament about the government’s intention to privatise aspects of Medicare:
“What we are looking at, as we look at in every area, is improving the delivery of government services … looking at ways to take the health and aged care payment system into the 21st century. This is about making it simpler and faster for patients to be able to transact with Medicare, to get the services they are entitled to.”
Yep, no privatisation there. That’s not how privatisation works. Privatisation is where the government tells you that they’re incapable of running something efficiently because they’re not really all that good. They then cut the funding to prove how badly they’re running it. When people are fed up, they sell it to a private company, who make a couple of changes before putting up the price and making heaps of money through cutting the services. In return for their massive profits, the private company makes an altruistic donation to some organisation committed to public service, such as the Liberal Party.
Flexibility, it’s even more important than innovation!
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