Treasury’s spurious claim that stagnant wages are at least partially caused by workers not moving to higher-paying firms has not been met warmly by Crikey readers. They seemed to agree with Bernard Keane’s sentiment that Treasury is tying itself in knots trying to defer blame from the Coalition’s economic management. Elsewhere, readers took on the dire state of private health insurance and had some suggestions for a solution to airline carbon emissions.
On wage stagnation and workers
Nicholas Pavlovski writes: To be told by people in Treasury that it was purely my own fault my wages were buying less was the kind of really stinging arrogance that is born of blind ignorance. I’m an active member of a white collar union and have marched plenty of times the last few years as well as stood on picket lines. Our powers to bargain and secure better wages have been so stripped back that we are lucky to be able to do anything at all. To be told I can get a better salary by simply getting a job at a better company was gobsmacking. Where are these better jobs at better employers, in the same country, let alone hemisphere? It was the kind of speech that only a wonk on a comfortable salary with a job for life and no possibility of ever getting sacked could make.
Lesley Graham writes: Bog standard Coalition thinking, they have to get themselves off the hook. The fact that the economy is a dead duck, floating, is a true reflection of the fact that this is what they’ve done over the last six years. They want the electorate to think that workers are to blame with what’s wrong with the economy, not government inaction and continued ignorance around encouraging business to invest in at best a stagnant economy.
On private health insurance
On the carbon emissions of flying
Richard Dennison writes: Everything we consume should be rated for carbon and saved against an average. These points would be entered onto our carbon credits which you would have to have in order to fly, so we have to earn our flights.
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Steven Westbrook writes: I think the Coalition might welcome this crisis as an excuse to push us in their preferred ideological direction. If a British system is the answer, it will be a titanic struggle, noting that this year is 70 years since Chifley’s noble attempt to nationalise the banks produced a fierce and successful resistance campaign by the private industry and the Liberals.