RECENTLY

This week in Senate Estimates I asked the Australian Public Service Commissioner, John Lloyd, about an email to the IPA he sent commenting on Labor Senator, Penny Wong

What we saw were the murky workings of the Coalition on full display. Now the Prime Minister has the power, and exclusively the power, to appoint ministerial staff. Yet it became apparent yesterday that in practice the Prime Minister's office is merely a post box for the asks from the National Party. 

It is ten years today since Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered a formal apology to Australia’s First Nations People and the Stolen Generation. 

he Fairwork Commission dismissed the application by early educators. The union for early educators to address their historic under evaluation of their work. To put it in context, our early educators do some of the most important work.

Early childhood educators perform some of the most valuable work in our society for less than half the average Australian wage. Anyone who has had a child attend child care knows the importance of a good teacher and how central they are to a child's life.

I think there needs to be very serious consequences for whoever was responsible for this. It's a little bit hard to pre-empt or to say what those consequences might be without knowing any of the details about how this came about but, on the face of it, it is a very significant breach of security. 

I fear this won't be the last time that I rise in the Senate to talk about the ways employers are working around the safeguards of the Fair Work Act and it won't be the last time that I rise to talk about the ways big companies are seeking to avoid their tax obligations—and, in doing so, seeking to deprive all Australians of the revenue that government needs to provide hospitals, schools, infrastructure and apprenticeships.

This Government is creating a myth—the deserving and non-deserving poor, where poverty and unemployment are recast as personal or moral failure rather than a result of complex people facing complex challenges.

Quite often, the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to an individual—someone who has used their power or their platform to achieve a worthy end. However, ICAN is something very different. It didn't inherit any pre-existing platform; it willed it into existence through a gradual accretion of individuals and organisations to its cause.

The Government's attempts to fundamentally alter superannuation governance laws is not about improving outcomes for ordinary people who have their money invested in these funds. This is simply an ideological obsession with eliminating the role of trade unions from public life.