Can't live on the wage you bring home but can't get a raise from the boss? Here's the reasons why

In 2016 an est. 3.89 million people living in New South Wales had a personal weekly income of between $0 and $644 per week, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

In Tasmania an est. 1.03 million people had way less than $573 per week.

Between March Quarter 2016 and March Quarter 2017 wages growth remained at record lows.

So this should come as no surprise……

Industrial relations lawyer Josh Bornstein writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 July 2017:

When Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe recently declared a "wages crisis" following a prolonged period of low wages growth, it appears to have caught the federal government on the hop. Quick to respond to crises about border protection, terrorism and rising energy prices, this is one crisis that renders the government mute. There is no plan, no working group, or commissioning of a white paper from the Productivity Commission. Instead, the government has announced a plan to pay up to 10,000 "interns" to work in the retail industry for as little as $4 an hour. This plan will only exacerbate the wages crisis.

Phillip Lowe is not the first prominent mandarin to observe that stagnant wages threaten economic growth. A new consensus has emerged since the Global Financial Crisis that anaemic wages growth and increased income inequality is retarding economies and stoking political volatility in developed economies. Nevertheless, Lowe is the first in Australia to join the chorus. His suggested remedy – that employees need to speak up more to request higher pay – is strikingly naive, inviting the obvious question. What if the boss says "no"?

Lowe's counterpart at the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, has offered a more sophisticated analysis of the wages crisis, focused on the transformation of the labour market. Haldane recently observed that profound changes in workplaces had produced a period of "divide and conquer" that left workers less able to bargain for higher wages. "There is power in numbers. A workforce that is more easily divided than in the past may find itself more easily conquered. In other words, a world of divisible work may reduce workers' wage-bargaining power," he said.

The collapse in bargaining power for workers that Haldane has observed is reflected in the plight of Australian trade unions, which are languishing at their weakest point in their history. Only 14.5 per cent of employees belong to a trade union. In the private sector, that number sits at a shocking 10 per cent and falling. The tipping point passed long ago. Australian trade unions are fighting for their survival. That wage growth and employee share of GDP has hit record lows is no coincidence…..

The explanation for the severity of the collapse of unionisation is far more prosaic. It's our laws. Unions have been seriously weakened by 30 years of constant political and legislative attacks. The last conservative prime minister not to establish a royal commission into trade unions was Billy McMahon (1971-1972). For decades, business lobby groups have permanently and successfully campaigned for legislative change that weakens unions.

In this era, workplace laws have been changed in two key ways. First, the laws have been deregulated to encourage employers to cut wages and de-unionise their workplaces. At the same time, unions have been subjected to complex regulation that restricts their ability to access workplaces, recruit members and to bargain for better wages and conditions. The laws have allowed employers unprecedented ability to cut labour costs, outmanoeuvre employees and their unions while at the same time inveigling unions into a kind of regulatory quicksand…..

Read the full article here.

The American Resistance has many faces and this is just one of them (10)

New York Magazine, 3 July 2017:

Until late last month, former federal prosecutor Hui Chen worked in the Justice Department’s fraud section, ensuring that corporations followed federal ethics laws. She started the job in the fall 2015, but in the last six months it became impossible to conduct her duties without feeling as if she was “shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic,” she recently wrote on LinkedIn. So she quit, and she blames the White House:

First, trying to hold companies to standards that our current administration is not living up to was creating a cognitive dissonance that I could not overcome. To sit across the table from companies and question how committed they were to ethics and compliance felt not only hypocritical, but very much like shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. Even as I engaged in those questioning and evaluations, on my mind were the numerous lawsuits pending against the President of the United States for everything from violations of the Constitution to conflict of interest, the ongoing investigations of potentially treasonous conducts, and the investigators and prosecutors fired for their pursuits of principles and facts. Those are conducts I would not tolerate seeing in a company, yet I worked under an administration that engaged in exactly those conduct. I wanted no more part in it.

As a compliance expert in DOJ’s fraud section, Chen essentially served as a corporate crime watchdog. She helped ensure that companies made changes to the policies that resulted in their prosecution and then monitored the effectiveness of those changes.

Little surprise, then, that the Trump’s administration lax approach to ethics rules rankled Chen. In the months after Trump’s inauguration, she began to attend protests during her lunch hour, among other subtle acts of defiance, the International Business Times notes.

Would you trust these men with your personal health information? Part Two

Left to Right: Minister for Human Services and Liberal MP for Aston, Alan Tudge

& Minister for Health and Liberal MP for Flinders, Greg Hunt

The Guardian, 8 July 2017:

The government found itself facing heavy criticism this week over how it handles Australians’ personal information, after a Guardian investigation revealed a darknet trader was illegally selling the details of any Medicare card holder on request by “exploiting a vulnerability” in a government system.

The data had been for sale since at least October 2016, and the seller appears to have sold the Medicare details of at least 75 Australians…..

“What’s happening is the community is wrapping these attacks together and seeing them as a threat, and it adds to a perception that their data is not safe,” said Australia’s privacy commissioner, Timothy Pilgrim. “All the players need to work out a way to build up that trust.”

But why do these breaches keep happening? And is the government doing everything it can to stop them, and reassure the public when they do happen?

After being alerted by the Guardian to the Medicare breach, the minister took swift action, referring it to the Australian federal police for investigation. Pilgrim welcomed this as an appropriate response…..

The most critical risk to Australians from the misuse of Medicare card data is one of identity fraud. A fake Medicare card with legitimate details can get a criminal a quarter of the way to an entire fake ID. This could then be used by organised crime groups in any number of ways, for example by leasing property or equipment. It could also be used to fraudulently obtain services from Medicare itself.

In this case, the darknet was the vehicle for this particular identity fraud scam. But it didn’t need to be, and it is likely similar, less-sophisticated scams are taking place right now.

Tudge has used an unusual line to explain the breach. He has said it was not a hack or cyber attack, but “traditional criminal activity”. What he’s edging around is that his department believe this was a case of an individual using a legitimate method to access Medicare data – but for an unauthorised and illegal purpose.

But contrary to Tudge’s assertion, access control is very much a matter of cybersecurity. And there are a lot of problems with the way Medicare card details can be obtained.

For instance more than 200,000 individual users can potentially look up Medicare card details through the department’s system. The department has declined to answer whether each access is logged, which could allow it to trace when a particular card was looked up. If those controls aren’t there, it’s unlikely the darkweb vendor selling this data will be found.

It doesn’t mean someone sitting in a doctor’s clinic has been supplying the data. A prospective patient could show up at a GP’s reception, pretending to be someone else, and just ask for that person’s Medicare card details. Guardian Australia has spoken with one employee at a medical practice who said people regularly asked for their card details to be supplied.

Identity fraud using Medicare cards is coming to be seen as a big problem in the government. The human services department acknowledged in February 2016 that there had been 1,500 “probable” cases of Medicare fraud, a jump from 269. The Australian reported that in 2014 the justice minister, Michael Keenan, set out to quantify the scale of Medicare card fraud taking place. A study found Medicare cards and driving licences were the mostly commonly used forms of ID for fraudsters.

The problem appears to be growing worse as those given credentials to access Medicare card details legitimately has increased – jumping 25% in the last financial year – and as organised crime groups grow more sophisticated in their methods.

All of this contributes to the loss of trust….

Would you trust these men with your personal health information? , 5 July2017

Anthony John "Tony' Abbott MP: "a study in male rage"

The Saturday Paper, 8-!4 July @017:

                                              

Periodically, a fact is so self-evident that to state it can make its obviousness seem startling. This, for example: There is no force in public life more destructive than Tony Abbott.

For almost a decade, since he first became opposition leader, Tony Abbott has held Australia to ransom. He has trashed four parliaments. None were better for his presence in them.

His solitary skill is damage. He has wrecked institutions, torn down careers. He has ridiculed the rule of law and coarsened the realm of debate. He has governed against minorities and indulged himself at the expense of duty.

In opposition, he was driven by entitlement, by a loon-eyed belief that he had been anointed to higher office. Here was a man whose mother believed he would be pope or prime minister. Ill discipline denied him the former and cost him the latter.

Having lost the leadership, Abbott is driven by revenge. He has no interest but himself. His anger is the anger of confusion. Abbott cannot reconcile that the world is not the way he imagined it to be, with him as prime minister and the country docile in its satisfaction. This confusion is greater than simple self-interest: it is driven by the fact Abbott never understood he was living in a contemporary society; he governed for a world that no longer existed, for a fantasy of the past. His leadership was always illusory. His default has always been treachery.

That one man could do so much damage is testament to his corrosive gift for harm. Here is the man who held back the country on climate action, who invented whole electoral edifices to deny marriage equality. Here is the man who weaponised a fear of refugees and later Muslims, who made citizenship a plaything, who fractured the community in the hope of leading its broken wreckage. Here is a man for whom truth is an abstract concept. The most honest thing to be said about him is that he has a working substitute for integrity.

A person of any dignity would resign the parliament. There is no room for him in it and he has nothing to offer if he stays. Each day he remains, he serves only as a lesson in the flaws of the human character. He is a study in male rage…….

Tony Abbott has never provided good government. He has spent almost a decade denying it. The only decent thing he has left to contribute is his resignation.

*Photograph of Tony Abbott found on Google Images

Is the Turnbull Government trying to hide ramifications of the Abbott Government's clean energy blunder?

On 20 March 2014 the Abbott Liberal-Nationals Coalition Government’s Clean Energy Legislation (Carbon Tax Repeal) Act 2014 was passed by both houses of the Australian Parliament amid scenes of ministerial jubilation in the House of Representatives and became law on 17 July 2014.

Since then it appears that this ideologically driven move away from squarely facing the fact of climate change has seen Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions begin to rise once more, along with sharply rising energy costs to consumers.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 22 December 2016

Until it now seems the Turnbull Liberal-Nationals Coalition Government may be actively attempting to hide the increasingly bad news from the national electorate on whose behalf it purports to govern.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 July 2017:

The federal government has been keeping almost a year's worth of pollution data secret, despite it being scheduled for release in May, documents obtained under freedom of information laws reveal.

Independent estimates suggest Australia's greenhouse gas emissions have risen sharply since the government last released its quarterly data in December – a trend that would make the nation's commitment to cutting emissions more disruptive and expensive.

Quarterly updates by the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, described as "up-to-date information on emissions trends for business, policymakers and the public", have been released 28 times since 2009, but not since last year.

Documents obtained under FOI by the Australian Conservation Foundation reveal that while the government possesses data on greenhouse pollution for the two quarters leading up to the end of last year, it has failed to release them……

According to estimates by consultant NDEVR Environmental, Australia's overall emissions increased by 1.15 per cent in the first quarter of this year, while electricity sector emissions increased by 11 per cent.

The overall emissions increase is equivalent to an extra 2,308,846 cars on the road.

According to NDEVR Environmental, the increase is almost entirely attributable to electricity emissions, while other sectors such as transport emissions decreased over the quarter……

UPDATE

Australia's National Greenhouse Accounts, Quarterly Update of Australia's NationalGreenhouse Gas Inventory: December 2016 (incorporating the Quarterly Update:September 2016 quarter,released late Friday, 7 July 2017:

“For the December quarter 2016, national emissions levels, excluding the Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) sector, have increased 0.4 per cent relative to the previous quarter on a seasonally adjusted and weather normalised basis. For the year to December 2016, emissions increased 1.4 per cent on the previous year.”

Rumble in the Digital Jungle

https://ghostbin.com/paste/h4y28

Hiding behind this statement is the determined efforts to stop discussion of the alleged issue of a specific Remote Control Execution said to be vulnerable tMan-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks, by one Simon Joseph Smith of www.evestigator.com.au &  www.cybersecurity.com.au 
who styles himself as "Australian's most elite Computer Digital Forensics Private Investigator...renowned in Australias as "Today Tonight's" Cyber-bullying Expert" .

Mr. Smith appears incensed:

https://ghostbin.com/paste/2nhwz

The resulting number of takedowns continues to grow.

As usual, getting this hissy online only results in more people having a look at the app in question's specifications and going on to make a snap judgment about the character of the hisser.

Snapshot of the Week

ABC TV, Adam Hills' The Last Leg, 14 June 2017