AUSTRALIAN Council of Trade Unions secretary Sally McManus, in my opinion, shows just how out of touch with the real world she is when she says that businesses can afford to pay lower income workers her proposed 7 per cent wage increase as they are making huge profits ('ACTU pushing for 7 per cent rise to minimum and award wages', Newcastle Herald, 30/3).
Certainly the banks and big firms like Coles, Woolies and Qantas probably fall into this category, but the same does not apply to the thousands of small mum-and-dad businesses where owners often have to work seven days a week just to survive with already very high overheads. The 7 per cent increase is actually at least 8 per cent when you factor in the flow-on increases to superannuation payments, annual leave loadings, and worker's compensation premiums. That all has to come out of the business owner's net profit, which more often than not means price increases to the customer to cover the extra costs. That only adds to inflation, so it's a neverending cycle. Of course the government also gets a cut of any wage increase by way of extra tax, meaning the wage earner doesn't get the full increase anyway.
I am all for low income earners getting help with the cost of living but I feel that a 3 per cent increase would be more realistic from the employer's point of view, particularly as they would have to be feeling the pinch just the same as everyone else.
Ian King, Warners Bay
Church tactic courts hypocrisy
I BELIEVE your article ('Disgust over 'perpetrator is dead' defence', Herald, 31/3) shines the light on the hypocrisy of the organisations of the Marist Brothers and the Catholic Church.
While publicly beating their breasts and apologising for the sexual abuse perpetrated by some of their clergy, in my experience these organisations privately take every opportunity to try to squirm out of their legal and moral obligations to compensate survivors and their families in a material and meaningful way.
The fact that the actual perpetrator of the sexual abuse has died does not mean that any claim arising out of the abuse against the organisation of which the perpetrator was a member automatically dies with them, although it has to be recognised that in some cases (but not all, by any means) the defendant organisation may be at a tactical disadvantage in the litigation.
As Geoffrey Nash is quoted as saying, it is up to the organisation to make an active choice to try to raise the death of the perpetrator as a total barrier to the claim. As he says, lawyers act on the instructions they are given. For an organisation professing to follow and teach principles of Christianity to give instructions to their lawyers to try to defeat the legitimate claims of abused persons solely because the perpetrator clergy member of that organisation has died, while publicly acknowledging and apologising for the harm done by that clergy member and other clergy members of that organisation, is in my opinion pure, distilled hypocrisy of the highest class. It was probably only equalled some years ago by the late Cardinal George Pell blaming the church's lawyers for having used what became known as the Ellis defence to defeat successfully a claim by John Ellis for sexual abuse, but that's another story... of hypocrisy.
Louis Pirona, Blackalls Park
Handwriting a special type of skill
I FOUND your article the Saturday before last interesting but a bit sad, Garry Linnell, ('Not-so-mighty penmanship put to the sword', Opinion, 1/4). In part you wrote (or typed) about the lack of penmanship and teaching of writing skills.
Many years ago Karl Marx wrote that man would become an appendage of the machine, but I sighed and said "not in my time", yet here it is as bad as it can get.
Machines have slowly been taking charge of our lives since the Industrial Revolution. No, I'm not that old but old enough to see so many changes. Now it appears that we will no longer communicate by personal letters or notes or even verbally. Now if we don't have a machine we don't communicate it seems. Is it really too hard to write legibly?
I am not that old fashioned that I can ignore machines and I'm not a Luddite. I own an iPad, mobile phone and a desktop computer (now over 20 years old). I also have a typewriter produced in the 1940s in Germany that I purchased in an op shop specifically to show my granddaughter how it used to be.
Learning to type at school was certainly cumbersome. Handwriting and speaking to each other will always be superior. I have even taught myself a little calligraphy but I consider myself a modern woman and enjoy most of the modern world but surely there is a place for handwriting in there somewhere.
I have loved words and writing all of my life and personally I remain hopeful that we never lose the skill.
I have watched people out for dinner in cafes and restaurants not speak to each other but simply use their thumbs to tap away messages to their companion or their friends. What a wasted opportunity for meaningful communication.
Denise Lindus Trummel, Newcastle
Rate pain demands more of RBA
DURING inflationary periods, interest rate rises are used to reduce expenditure to the economy's ability to produce goods and services. The rises reduce new borrowing and add to people's cost of living ('There's plenty of pain to come', Herald, 5/4). The problem with interest rate rises is that they discriminate against borrowers and create mortgage foreclosures, business bankruptcies and unemployment. In the housing market, owner occupiers and renters bear the brunt of interest rate rises. But the owners of investment properties can pass on some hurt to renters and the tax office.
There must be a better way of slowing private expenditure which is less economically damaging and less discriminatory against poorer members of our society. In the 'good old days', the Reserve Bank (RBA) had qualitative controls over lending as well as some direct quantitative controls.
Maybe some RBA direct controls could be reinstated following the ongoing review of its operations. With minimal interest rate rises, the RBA could then require banks and non-bank lenders to reduce their new lending, particularly to investor-landlords. Overseas borrowing could be reduced, thus limiting the effect on the Australian economy of rising world interest rates. In the longer term, investor tax breaks such as negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions could be phased out, diverting investment into more productive ventures.
A less discriminatory way of reducing disposable income and private expenditure would be to increase direct income taxes, but any tax rises would be hard to sell to the electorate by any federal government.
Geoff Black, Caves Beach
SHORT TAKES
DID anyone, anyone at all, ever expect that Opposition leader Peter Dutton would support the Indigenous Voice to Parliament?
Fred McInerney, Karuah
IN reply Matt Ophir (Short Takes, 3/4): privatising became a big part of Howard's way, designed to pass responsibility from pollies to business.
Harold Kronholm, Cessnock
SINCE 1995, when News Corp started the Super League and the rugby league clubs then came back together in 1998 under the banner of the NRL, all we hear about is the money that's in the game now. It's evident when some players are earning in excess of a million dollars a year, and yet we now have the NRL threatening to take the NRL grand final interstate unless the state government invests money in suburban grounds. Recently we heard that the federal government apparently must invest $200 million dollars over 10 years to help expand the league to 20 teams, including a team called Pasifika to represent the island nations of the Pacific. When will the money-grabbing end, because in the end we the supporters will be the ones doing the paying?
Greg Parrey, Rutherford
THE World Nuclear Industry Status Report found that the cost of generating solar power ranged from $36 - $44 per megawatt hour (MWh). Onshore wind power was $29 to $56 per MWh while nuclear power was between $112 and $189 per MWh. The local nuclear fan club might be prepared to pay exorbitant prices for nuclear power decades down the track, but I'm not so sure the rest of the community and businesses would be so overjoyed considering those cheaper sources of energy are ready to be exploited right here, right now with the appropriate political leadership.
John Arnold, Anna Bay
DENNIS Crampton claims that unions are running amok ('Labor pains are stacking up', Letters, 6/4), but they're not. We have the Fair Work Commission. The problem people have with it is that it actually spends much of its time dealing with the practices of questionable employers. We've ended the rorts of the unions and cut a few carriages off the politicians' gravy train. Now it's time to end the rorts of the business community, which are far more damaging to the country. Run a business into the ground but you're not responsible for the debts; the business is. Put the profit into someone else's name and you keep the big house, fancy car and money in the trust fund, laughing at those stupid subcontractors and employees losing wages, holiday pay and super you never paid. If there are assets not readily liquefied before you go under, like property for instance, no problem; just have another legal entity ready that is owed money by yourself so it can claim any residual value in your company for you.
Colin Fordham, Lambton
MORE Supercars costs for ratepayers with stolen outdoor furniture that was taken away for the race and the South Newcastle skate park project that never should have happened ('Picnic tables and chairs stolen', Newcastle Herald, 5/4).
