What the dickens? Morrison wants kids driving forklifts
By TBS Newsbot
Faced with a labour shortage he helped create, Scott Morrison will ask the national cabinet if kids can legally drive forklifts.
Scott Morrison’s national cabinet has taken a bizarre, almost Antoinette-Esque solution to the crisis of supply. Instead of letting people eat the cake they don’t have, Morrison wants children to drive heavy machinery they really shouldn’t.
As reported by Ben Butler of The Guardian, “Scott Morrison will ask the states to allow children to drive forklifts at today’s national cabinet meeting as part of measures to ease the staff shortages crippling supply chains…as anyone who’s ever worked in a factory or warehouse knows, forklifts are a very dangerous piece of machinery – a person was killed in a forklift accident in Victoria on Tuesday.”
In the Eastern states, the minimum age to meet the eligibility for the high-risk work licence needed to drive one is 18. Now, let me preface this by saying that the children of today are extremely competent and would probably take it very seriously and be very professional throughout.
As former union boss Tim Lyons wrote on Twitter, “get back to me when you can square ‘unlicensed minors driving high-risk equipment’ with the employer’s statutory duty to maintain a safe system of work – and that’s before we get to straight out negligence.”
However, as far as solutions go, this absolutely isn’t it. Indeed, we find ourselves in an increasingly familiar position, reading actual quotes that we have to check isn’t satire. As satirical publication The Shovel noted, “Last week one of our regular contributors submitted the headline “PM To Roll Back Child Labour Laws To Fill Gaps In Supply Chains”. But we knocked it back because it was too ridiculous.”
We've entered the sitcom phase of the pandemic pic.twitter.com/AQ2TZXZrVa
— marquelawyers (@marquelawyers) January 19, 2022
But as Anne Twomey wrote for The Big Smoke, we don’t have to listen to any nonsense he puts forward, as “the national cabinet does not make laws. It has no legal powers at all. It is simply an intergovernmental body whose members discuss and agree on matters. As with any inter-governmental agreement, the national plan is not legally enforceable.
“The members of the national cabinet – the prime minister, state premiers and chief ministers – are each responsible to their own parliament and, through it, their own people. The decisions of the national cabinet can only be implemented by each jurisdiction in accordance with its own laws. If a state government and parliament object to something agreed on by the national cabinet, then it can choose not to implement it.
“This was recognised when the national cabinet was created. The minutes of the national cabinet meeting of March 15 2020, which record its terms of reference, state: “The National Cabinet does not derogate from the sovereign authority and powers of the Commonwealth or any State or Territory government. The Commonwealth and the States and Territories, as appropriate, remain responsible for the implementation of responses to the Coronavirus.”
“The prime minister also recognised this in a press conference on May 5 2020. He said: ‘We’re a federation and, at the end of the day, states have sovereignty over decisions that fall specifically within their domain […] At the end of the day, every Premier, every Chief Minister has to stand in front of their state and justify the decisions that they’re taking in terms of the extent of the restrictions that are in place […] I respect the fact that they’ve each got to make their own call, just like I do, and they’ve got to explain it to the people who live in their state and they’ve got to justify it. And I think that’s the appropriate transparency and accountability.’”
This article was originally published on The Big Smoke.
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Return to home pageIs it true he has called for donations of kids with trolleys and canaries in cages in attempts to keep his coal mines open
They are cheaper than grownups and don’t question the boss.
IS THIS A JOKE? Surely, this is pure SATIRE.
For a start, it takes MONTHS of training in order to be able to drive a piece of industrial machinery like a forklift, correctly;
Noone is ALLOWED to drive a forklift (or any other dangerous piece of industrial machinery) without providing written PROOF or CERTIFICATION of such training to their employer!
Strict OH&S regulations (supported by most Unions) will NEVER EVER allow ANYONE under the age of 18 to drive a forklift;
Besides all of the above regulations, in a practical sense, there is NO WAY a child’s feet could even reach the operating pedals and brakes of a big item of machinery such as a forklift;
NO WAY would any UNION overseeing the driving of forklifts EVER allow a child dangerous access to a forklift – the risk to the child and to others is inevitable and insurmountable!
How long would the incomprehensible idiot, Morrison, allow children to be used as unpaid child labour? Are children to be forced to drive forklifts outside of school holidays when they are supposed to be safe and sound in schools being educated? The whole idea is so fraught with danger, it is INSANE!
If Morrison is insinuating that his irrational, insane regime are stupid enough to allow underage children to defy Union regulations and ignore every common sense rule to protect their safety in allowing an untrained, under-aged child access to a piece of industrial machinery as dangerous as a forklift, then they deserve to be tossed out of government TODAY!
This sounds like SATIRE but, then again, you can NEVER underestimate the stupidity of Morrison and the lengths they will go to in order to satiate the greed and insanity of his billionaire corporate donors, eh?
If this is NOT a joke, then the LNP are every bit as stupid, dangerous, short-sighted and unspeakably moronic as we all suspect them to be! MORRISON NEEDS TO BE SACKED – HE HAS COMPLETELY LOST THE PLOT !!!
All part of IPA “Labour Reform”.
They never give up because, as bullies, they are ingrained with a conditioning that refuses self reflexivity and empathy and they wont be happy until the whole of civilisation is returned to feudalism.
They don’t call this “sado-ecnomics” for nothing.
Out of the coal mines and mills and into fork lifts…that’s progress. Bonuses for slaves of more tobacco and reduced hours for women, to eighty a week, will follow. The P M, a Putridity Mess, seeks miraculous muck from the depths of superstitious shitskullery.
Another classic Crosby Textor type deflection. The idiot will try anything to get people to not focus on the dire state of the omicron surge.
I wait see his daughters and and children of the other members of his rabble, driving forklifts.
He’s all piss and bullshit.
Very short memories in the LNP. When it suits them. Remember how a few unscrupulous tradies used untrained men and boys to install pink bats?? They even held a RC into it. Another example is the risks young backpackers have faced in being forced to work on farms. Heat stroke and accidents. Put young people behind a wheel on anything and they think they know it all.. No one should be doing a job that they are not paid and trained for and definitely not children.
You’re all so very cruel. It may be that a sacred eagle descended from the heavens and told him to reinstitute child labour.
This HAS to be a joke.
I used to drive a forklift for a Transport company 7 years ago. Probably can still do it now. Licence expired years ago. At 72 2 weeks of work would not go astray. Doubt that anyone will beat a path to my door.
I starting up a labour hire company to employ 5 year old fruit pickers, coal miners (joke intended) and chimney sweeps. I have Gina on side. And they’re cheap to feed.
I wonder, did anyone get a photo of this announcement??? I am sure scummo will want that on his social media.
It is abundantly clear that we have a Prime Minister who is totally unsuitable for any office. Like the two foreign countries about which we know the most – the USA and the UK – Australia was offered a man that is an inveterate liar, will shift blame to anybody he can, and denies things he said the day before despite overwhelming evidence. A classic sociopath who will (and did!) stop at nothing to get any job he lusted after. Trump, Johnson, Morrison. A toxic trio. Trunp got 46.1% of the votes cast when he was elected by the Electoral College. Johnson got 43.1% of the vote when he was elected in a first past the post electorate. Morrison got 51.5% of the popular vote. All three electorates knew full well what they were being offered. All three countries have a MSM that is careless with the facts, the most potent of which is the Murdoch empire, which supported all three winning candidates/parties. All three countries are led by noxious slime bags, but we – Australia- by a clear uncontested majority. TRULY chose the leader we wanted, and cannot complain that he has proven to be what we always knew he was.
“Faced with a Labour shortage he helped create”‘
So perfectly put, TBS Newsbot.
It’s simply a cheap rhetorical blip that justifies casual or temporary workforces of employees with sub-optimal skills?
As PW says above says, this concurs with IPA policy i.e. ‘Kochonomics’, avoid permanent award conditions in current times, in preparation for return to normal service (and some outlets continue with the planned immigration flood rhetoric); backgrounded by ageing employees in most sectors.
If looking at Australia’s working age population https://data.oecd.org/pop/working-age-population.htm 66% of the total, we are neither unique nor young and have passed the working age sweet spot.
We are entering a more globally competitive race for working age population with (declining fertility) increasing dependency ratios i.e. older people now starting to outnumber younger….. but the latter have to pay taxes to support more of the former who are catered to for votes?