A holiday

This blog is taking a holiday.

There are a number of reasons, but the biggest is that I am going to be out of the country for the next 5 weeks, which would make keeping in touch with NSW politics difficult to say the least.

Rest assured that once I am back in town in late November the posts will resume.

Play nice...

[use your imagination to insert cheesy holiday pic]

A Strike Without Notice

Has the puff gone out of the protests against the cuts to the public service?

You may or may not be aware, but there was a Public Service Association strike today. No, really:

From here

I didn't hear a peep. Today I caught a train, walked through the city, and spent most of the day before a court staffed exclusively by public servants - and if one of the other lawyers hadn't said "I thought you lot were striking?" I wouldn't have known anything was going on.

Apparently, there was a march or something?

From the SMH

I certainly heard and saw nothing. And "hundreds" of workers converging on Town Hall is hardly noteworthy.

It seems like the TV coverage was no different:

This was particularly surprising given that, after a little poking around, it became apparent that the IRC had formally ordered that the strike not proceed:

From the SMH

I'm not sure how the success or otherwise of strikes is measured with the PSA. But when this is the best you can do:

Full story here

...perhaps it is time to admit that the battle isn't really getting the masses outraged.

It's pretty clear that the Coalition government (like the Labor government before it) is happy (or resigned) to take the Public Service Association on.

Given that, at the end of the day, the government really does hold the pursestrings, it would seem that the PSA is on a hiding to nothing.

Are these strikes a desperate grab for relevance in a world where people are increasingly skeptical about the benefit of the enormous dues that the PSA demand?

Perhaps. What is clear is that the strike today didn't really excite anyone. And it certainly will not have worried the government.

A Parroted Condemnation

I'm going to do my best to not add unnecessarily to the explosion of writing on Alan Jones in the last few days.

As for the comments themselves, @bernietb said it in a way few of us could:

Obviously, he (Jones, not Bernie) is just an awful person.

What I was more interested in discussing was the unrelenting demand for our politicians to condemn what he said.

I can understand journalists pursuing politicians demanding a condemnation. It gives them the chance to stretch a few more stories about the issue.

First there is the reporting of the comments, then we have the attempts to contact the maker, then the people who condemn the comments, then those that have still "refused" to condemn the comments, then the apology - and by then someone has said something new and we can all move on and be outraged about something else.

It's a bit pathetic - but if I was journalist working on unrealistic deadlines and impossible demands for content then perhaps I'd do the same thing.

Of course the people who perceive that they profit from the outrage will happily buy into the stupidity, so over the weekend we were treated to this:

And, of course, inevitably, this:

Of course, the timing of this whole thing was interesting, given that earlier last week Jones had torn into Barry O'Farrell on his show:

Have a listen here

The punters loved it

Of course, in due course O'Farrell eventually did have something to say. Well, sort of:

This was an odd little comment, for a number of reasons.

First of all, everyone assumed that O'Farrell was talking about Jones. He certainly did and said nothing to suggest otherwise - so why not say his name?

Moreover, as condemnations go, it was a pretty weak one. It's a vague comment that suggests a certain disapproval - but that's all.

Some people suggested that the vagueness was intentional:

Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't. What was dumb was the constant demand on O'Farrell to condemn Jones' statement.

It is entirely irrelevant to O'Farrell's job what Alan Jones says. If people want to petition O'Farrell to ban his ministers from appearing on the show, or to stop the NSW Government advertising on his show (assuming they do) then so be it.

But to relentlessly demand that he condemn something that someone said is just petty, and even childish.

And the fact that the comment was made at a Sydney University Liberal Club dinner does not change that. By all means criticise the Liberal Party and suggest that the leaders of the club should be spoken to/stood down/sent to bed without dinner - but to demand that O'Farrell condemn the comments seems like a shameless attempt to profit politically from what Jones said.

Really, it is little different from demanding that Jones apologise. Does anyone really think he meant a word of the "apology" he delivered yesterday?

 

Of course he didn't. 

O'Farrell may have meant what he tweeted yesterday, or he may not. We'll never know, because he relented to enormous pressure from some groups to say the right thing.

He certainly got the right coverage for it:

Full story on SMH

And no doubt before the week is out the press (and twitter) will have moved on to rage about something else.

Indeed.