When America says jump, Australia asks, “how high, master?”

Better start getting used to even more American bullshit flooding into the vassal states. Considering how much Australia loves swearing undying fealty to the USA you guys might as well just join as the 51st state.

Yeah, it’s bullshit. Labor are trying to destroy unions. It’s the logical conclusion of their shifting right to appeal to voters.

Labor are barely even Labor and I’ve lost any tiny amount of hope I had left. Long time coming tbh, they’ve been shit for my entire lifetime.

In my head saying, “I’d rather have a corrupt union over a regular corporation” sounds like a massive own but fortunately I don’t know people to get into these sorts of debates with

Not many things are dumber than America, but copying America is

Australia’s media is genuinely the most annoying media on the planet. It beats fox news in annoying levels.

So yeah I’m pretty sure my friend’s husband probably hates me now lmao.

That is a merit, considering the context.

all unions are corrupt, haven’t you seen The Sopranos?

Bob Hawke broke unions in Australia

The Americans particularly appreciated Hawke’s willingness to deradicalise the labour movement. As Coventry puts it: “Hawke proved useful in pre-empting and pacifying union disputes.”

After Hawke’s death in 2019, pundits celebrated him as an authentic, strine-speaking ocker, devoted to “unionism, labourism and the Labor party”.

The Americans thought different. For them, Hawke was “an experienced chameleon”, a man who “successfully played down his academic record and bookish background” to present himself as “the ideal Australian Labor leader”.

The cables show that as early as 1974 the US was suggesting to Hawke that he foster a “tripartite committee of unions, employers and government” to reach agreement on wages and other industrial issues.

After becoming prime minister in 1983, Hawke implemented the prices and income accord, a project in which the labour movement embraced wage restraint as part of an ongoing collaboration with employers and the state. In her important 2018 book How Labour Built Neoliberalism, Elizabeth Humphrys argues that Hawke’s accord – with its commitment to market principles, privatisations and user-pay mechanisms – brought into Australia the neoliberal strategies that were elsewhere implemented by the parties of the right.

Anyway our unions are weak and captured at best, but your friend’s husband is a fucking idiot

yeah i’ve been seeing the weird red scare bs as of late. i didn’t realise how much dormant union-hate existed here…

fuck Labor, fuck the media - lapdogs of industrial lobby groups

Because I’m an idiot all I replied was “They got rid of unions so they didn’t have to pay their workers. It’s not really a good thing.”

It is not worth holding your tongue for these types. Most of the time they don’t really care that much and there’s a small chance you’ll actually make them think a little, and if they’re that invested that an offhand comment actually gets under their skin then they’re the one being a problem not you

Australian unions are not even that radical (also which one do I join?)

pissing people off is good maybe itll make them think about communism