Les Affaires posted:

Hi guys, I have a request for all and sundry. I'm looking for people to share their experiences in employment in Australia, ranging from having, losing, looking for, regaining and keeping it. I'm interested in stories good and bad, but only if you're comfortable about posting it. In particular I'm interested in how your interaction with Centrelink and Job Services Australia have either helped or hampered (both?) your job search.

I also want to know whether you have tried for jobs that aren't "ideal" for you but still something to tide you over before getting a job you prefer.

This is part of a discussion I am having with my wife about the barriers to employment for Australians, and in general I think it's good to highlight these things from time to time anyway.

If you could also include how long you were unemployed for and which part of Australia you were/are living in, that would help too.

Thanks!

Recoome posted:

Apparently (and allegedly), the cost per unit goes down as time goes on, and previous estimates may have been done under the assumption that the cost would not decrease.

Les Affaires posted:

Thanks!

hiddenmovement posted:

Dota 2 saved me. Dota loving 2.

hiddenmovement posted:

In about August 2012, after months of sitting on my arse doing nothing but churning through the hellscape that is Australian Dota pub community (MilkyMoore is a rager btw),

hiddenmovement posted:

Dota 2 saved me. Dota loving 2.

Recoome posted:

Disclaimer: I'm not in favour of the F-35

A really cool hot-take I have is that the cost of the F-35 is now to the point where it's not much more expensive than an F/A-18, and although I can't give you my source, it's a pretty good source.

My observation is that Defence doesn't want to challenge the negative PR regarding the F-35 because you don't want to have the perception of a super-fighter like the F-22. Interestingly, the Russians did this with the MiG-25/MiG-31 and it backfired spectacularly, as the Americans ended up developing a fighter which had the stats of the hyped plane. A practical Australian example in this case is the Collins-class subs, which are actually quite good.

Like I really think we spend our money in the wrong places, and the F-35 is probably one of those places but I hope that this provides like an alternate hot take to the F-35 bad thing.

Les Affaires posted:

Hi guys, I have a request for all and sundry. I'm looking for people to share their experiences in employment in Australia, ranging from having, losing, looking for, regaining and keeping it. I'm interested in stories good and bad, but only if you're comfortable about posting it. In particular I'm interested in how your interaction with Centrelink and Job Services Australia have either helped or hampered (both?) your job search.

I also want to know whether you have tried for jobs that aren't "ideal" for you but still something to tide you over before getting a job you prefer.

This is part of a discussion I am having with my wife about the barriers to employment for Australians, and in general I think it's good to highlight these things from time to time anyway.

If you could also include how long you were unemployed for and which part of Australia you were/are living in, that would help too.

Thanks!

cheese-cube posted:

Off-topic: can someone repost that bayonet stabbing anti-fascist poster? It owns but I also need it.

quote:

Christmas banners without the ‘C-word’ have been torn down after a minister intervened



Miles Godfrey, The Daily Telegraph

December 15, 2016 12:00am



Sydney is fighting to keep Christmas Christian

BONKERS bureaucrats are trying to kill Christmas by airbrushing the C-word from signs and events in a mad, misguided attempt to avoid offending people.

Flags with the nonsensical slogan “very merry” — avoiding using the word “Christmas” — were torn down in The Rocks yesterday after no-nonsense Finance Minister Dominic Perrottet intervened.


“Very Merry means absolutely nothing to anyone,” Mr Perrottet said.

“When you leave out the one word that matters all you’re left with is a vacuous, bland platitude. It’s nonsense — but it’s an easy fix, and it turns out we didn’t even need a focus group to get the message right. I know it’s a bit out there but we’re going with ‘Merry Christmas’ this year.”

The flags were put up by an agency within the finance department but were ripped down yesterday on Mr Perrottet’s direct orders following a complaint from a taxpayer who said: “Stop spending my money denying an Australian (and world) celebration.”

Where’s Christmas? Banners in Circular Quay that read "Very Merry" only. Picture: John Grainger

The flags are being replaced on Friday with designs proudly emblazoned with “Merry Christmas”. Nearby, a statue of Santa has been erected made from plastic crates and bearing the slogan “Very Merry Crate-mas”.

Hawkesbury Council’s Christmas bash is called a “community appreciation party” but Mayor Mary Lyons-Buckett pointed out she does run a Christmas Mayoral Appeal.

Over at Sydney Airport, signs in the domestic terminal read: “Happy holidays to all, and to all a good flight” — a subversion of the final line from the famous poem A Visit from St Nicholas, popularly known as “The Night Before Christmas”.

The Very Merry banners were torn down yesterday after Finance Minister Dominic Perrottet intervened.

The true line of the poem reads: “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night”.

Christian Democrat Fred Nile is also livid about the attempts to kill Christmas: “It’s a trend and I’m very angry about it. I don’t want any of this ‘happy holiday’ business.’’

It comes after academics at University of New England tried to claim Santa is a “lie” and advised parents not to tell children about Father Christmas for fear of damaging them. In an example of “elf” and safety gone mad, Dr Kathy McKay and co-author Professor Christopher Boyle suggested parents put kids at risk of trauma by talking about Santa and condemned the idea of a “terrifying” North Pole intelligence agency judging behaviour.

kirbysuperstar posted:

I hope Fred Nile gets hit by a Christmas shopping courtesy bus

SuddenCactus posted:

quote:

Goat’s cheese curtain separates a nation growing more divided

BERNARD SALT

My name was again strewn across the media last month, not in relation to smashed avocados but ­because of a term I coined some years ago. As part of the negotiations to secure passage of the Australian Building and Construction Commission bill, senator David ­Leyonhjelm demanded that the ABC and SBS hold public board meetings to improve their connection with Middle Australia. “The ABC and SBS live inside the goat’s cheese curtain,” the senator said. The media correctly ascribed the origin of the term to me and, like smashed avocados and man drought, it has since infiltrated the Australian lexicon.

But what does “the goat’s cheese curtain” mean? About seven years ago I was completing a consulting report for Melbourne’s Footscray-based Vic­toria University when I noticed an outward shift in white-collar jobs. It was almost as if there was an imaginary line pushing inner-city gentrification west from Yarraville and Williamstown. I flippantly called this “the Latte Line” but in a subsequent presentation the term “the goat’s cheese curtain” popped out. It seemed like the right thing to say at the time and it has stuck.

The goat’s cheese curtain separates the two cultures that are ­increasingly dividing our cities. Inside this line live globally connected and, some might say, privileged knowledge workers, which is a variation on US academic Richard Florida’s concept of the creative class.

Beyond this line lives Middle Australia dominated by families and mortgages and commuters and car drivers and others ­engaged in less glamorous service and manufacturing-type jobs. In simple terms, the goat’s cheese curtain is the demarcation line separating the two sides of the culture wars. Hipsters cannot survive in what they consider to be the stale and fetid air of suburbia. Suburban Australians, on the other hand, cannot afford to live — let alone raise a family — in the heady atmosphere that uniquely pertains to life inside the goat’s cheese curtain.




Generally the census is the best way to track the geography of social division although this information is now five years old. ­Another way to track Australia’s social divide is via the Australian Electoral Commission, which publishes voting results by polling booth. Mapping this dataset proves the existence, and the political orientation, of those living inside the goat’s cheese curtain.

At the July federal election 14 million Australians voted at 7000 polling places such as local schools and council halls. The Greens secured about 9 per cent of the primary vote. Unlike the major parties, Greens votes are ­remarkably concentrated and in fact largely fall within the goat’s cheese curtain. The best perspective is provided in Melbourne, where the Greens won the primary vote in 93 polling booths scattered across an area extending between the Yarra River and Bell Street and between Punt Road and Footscray.

Herein lies Melbourne’s goat’s cheese curtain separated from the balance of the metropolitan area by political orientation and social composition. Inside Melbourne’s GCC 74 per cent of households have no children; outside this ­proportion is 54 per cent. Inside the GCC 62 per cent of locals have a university degree; outside the proportion is 41 per cent. ­Inside the GCC 18 per cent of the population work within the public sector; outside this figure is 13 per cent.



But there is another measure that I think even better divides the two cultures of Melbourne. Inside the GCC 33 per cent of the population is atheist; outside this proportion falls to 22 per cent. The godless and the god-fearing live either side of the goat’s cheese curtain. Here is a line that represents a green wall — the Godless Green Wall — that is being held in check by the flow of the Yarra River and by the upright determination of Punt Road. Sadly, St Kilda fell to godlessness long ago.

However, considering the ­location of polling booths where the Greens came second, it is evident that there is a weak point in the green wall. Clearly the wall is being weakened by godless and progressive hipsters at Cremorne, allowing a greenist incursion into the federal seats of Higgins and Kooyong. Maybe not in 2019, but quite possibly in 2022 or 2025.

The polling booth recording the highest proportion of Greens votes in Melbourne is located at Northcote High School, where this party snared 61 per cent of the primary vote. David Leyon­hjelm take note: Melbourne’s Peak Green lies 6km north of the ABC’s headquarters in ­Southbank.

Sydney is different in that the Greens vote is less than in the progressive heartland of Melbourne. Indeed the Greens won the primary vote in just five polling booths across Sydney but came second in 46 places. The weaker-than-Melbourne Greens heartland of Sydney sprawls across the inner city, stretching between Haberfield and Surry Hills and between North Sydney and Marrickville. And just as Punt Road stops the Greens hordes from spilling east in Melbourne, in Sydney the job of containing greenism’s eastern spillage falls to the stoic Eastern Distributor.



The social divide that separates the inner city from the rest of humanity in Melbourne is also evident in Sydney. Almost the same proportions that apply ­inside Melbourne’s Godless Green Wall in terms of social structure also apply inside Sydney’s GGW: 63 per cent have a university ­degree; 77 per cent of households have no children; 33 per cent are atheist. It’s almost as if these two bubbles separated by 900km are drawn from the same green ­genetic material. And yet Melbourne is even more progressed on the progressive spectrum. How can this be?

Melbourne evolved in the 19th century as Australia’s manufacturing and union heartland. The city has a long history of the capital/labour divide. The eight-hour day movement came out of Melbourne in 1856. The Eureka ­Rebellion (1854) came out of Victoria. Sydney’s suburbia is more conservative than Melbourne’s suburbia. It is unlikely that lockout laws, for ­example, would ever be as ­accepted by Melburnians as they are in Sydney.

Whereas 22 per cent of Melburnians outside the Godless Green Wall are atheist, this proportion for Sydney is 17 per cent. In comparison with Melbourne, Sydney is more Catholic, more ethnic, more disjointed (perhaps because of the terrain) than the great flat amorphous mass of metropolitan Melbourne, where values and thinking bleeds seamlessly from Fitzroy to Collingwood to Richmond.

Melbourne’s up-market South Yarra and neighbouring Toorak are home to 31,000 residents in a bold block of conservative free-enterprise values that hugs the southern bank of the Yarra. Sydney’s glitterati is bigger but is splintered into a series of competing forces whose centre is Double Bay (27,000), Vaucluse (13,000) and Woollahra (8000).

Where Sydney is scattered and divided, Melbourne is concen­trated and united. Melbourne is where the culture wars will be played out, not Sydney. Sydney lacks the history and the cultural unification to fight a sustained battle between opposing forces in the culture wars. Sydney might fashionably mimic Melbourne’s green values but it lacks sufficient passion to actually forsake all ­others in any but a few places. Sydney’s Peak Green is a polling place in Australia Street, Camperdown (42 per cent), in the electorate of Grayndler, which is a mere 3km from the ABC headquarters at Ultimo.

New census results available from April next year will provide further evidence of an intra-urban social divide that polling data already confirms every three years. Australia’s biggest cities are morphing into two states sepa­rated by belief as much as politics. The voting patterns evidenced in Sydney and Melbourne are replicated to lesser degrees in other big cities. Whereas Australian ­society was once simply divided between capital and labour and between city and bush, a new divide is emerging.

Some believe that the new divide is accentuated by sections of the media, but I am of the view that the divide is inherently based on the globalisation of knowledge work. The same values that mark the godless communities of Melbourne and Sydney’s Godless Green Wall are evident in similar parts of other global cities.

quote:

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has called for Australians to "rise up" to defend Christmas against what he calls "political correctness gone mad".

Angered by a talkback radio caller whose grandchild's school eschewed traditional carols for a secular celebration, Mr Dutton said the "vast majority of Australian people want to hear Christmas carols" as we are "a Christian society".

"You make my blood boil with these stories," the Christmas enthusiast told 2GB radio's Ray Hadley. "It is political correctness gone mad and I think people have just had enough of it."

Jim, a constituent of Mr Dutton's Dickson electorate in Queensland, told the station he attended a ceremony at Kedron State High School where there was "not one Christmas carol" and the final song replaced the lyrics of We Wish You A Merry Christmas with "we wish you a happy holiday".

Hadley blamed "left-wing teachers" and the school's principal, whom he wrongly assumed was a woman. "It's insulting, it's demeaning and it's a farce," he said.

Mr Dutton linked the issue to the "Teachers for Refugees" campaign in which many teachers in NSW and Victoria wore t-shirts protesting Australia's offshore detention camps for asylum seekers.

"If they want to conduct these sort of campaigns, do it online or do it in your spare time. Don't bring these sort of views into the minds of young kids," Mr Dutton told 2GB.

"Many of the people, regardless of their religious belief, would be .... happy to enjoy the fact that we celebrate Christmas as a Christian society. It's beyond my comprehension but it has gone too far."

Mr Dutton said the climate of political correctness reminded him of when people were "walking on eggshells" in mid-1990s under Labor prime minister Paul Keating, who elevated social issues such as Indigenous affairs, multiculturalism and inclusiveness.

"People had a gutful of it and I think we're back to the same stage now, and I think we need to rise up against it. People need to speak against it as they are," he said.

"Because the vast majority of Australian people want to hear Christmas carols. They want their kids to be brought up in a normal environment and they don't want to be lectured to by do-gooders who frankly don't practice what they preach in any case."

Fairfax Media has contacted the principal of Kedron State High School, Joseba Larrazabal, for comment. Hadley incorrectly assumed the principal was a woman.

"I think it's a female," Hadley said. "What she's got to get through her skull: by doing it, she causes division, because the kids who want to hear the Christmas carols ... suddenly target those minority groups."

It came days after the radio announcer complained to Treasurer Scott Morrison about political correctness regarding Christmas, which Mr Morrison also opposed.

"Have a great Christmas and enjoy the birth of our Lord," the Treasurer enthused.

Anidav posted:

WHAT ELSE BEGINS?

Cartoon posted:

Decorated or undecorated? This is important.

Fat_Kiwi posted:

Obeid got five years, non-parole for three years.

Fat_Kiwi posted:

Obeid got five years, non-parole for three years.

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

Nice try Bernard, but doesn't even come close to the greatest developments in Australian sociology; the Barassi line and the Red Rooster line.

iajanus posted:

As if there's ever been a line for Red Rooster.

Mr Chips posted:

My Centrelink/JSA story is that my payment was suspended for not attending an appointment that was set for a date 3 days before the letter was sent, ie in the past. I pointed this out, so Centrelink then set a followup appointment on a state holiday, when the JSA wasn't open.

I would blow Dane Cook posted: