To a degree the right to disconnect is like working from home, those policies affect white collar far more than blue collar, or min wage service workers, etc.

So in my mind it makes sense that, that reform went through without much issue. Everybody is on the side of the middle clas white collar worker it seems.

Its noticeable how much media time work from home has got since COVID over just about every other issue impacting workers. Maybe its because journalists identify more with it, maybe other classes of workers haven’t the power to effect change, and influence national conversations.

Eh, I think strictly codifying a law that basically exists but is potentially vague can be a good thing. This makes it absolutely undeniable that you have the right to disconnect from work, where previously you’d have to kind of work it out and employers might try to argue exceptions.

It’s like minimum passing laws for cyclists. A car going past a cyclist at 90 cm is obviously dangerous and irresponsible driving and any reasonable person would say it’s a chargeable offence for that reason. But in practice it very rarely got prosecuted, and even when it was it didn’t always succeed, because motornormative society defaults to saying the cyclist must be wrong. With a hard and fast rule that passing at less than 1 metre breaks the law, nobody can quibble about subjective matters like whether it’s dangerous or reckless.

Don’t disagree. But Max-Chandler’s comparison with banking, and religious institutions kind of makes that a hard argument to make.

Why are we suddenly seeing such hard and fast political reaction against the unions when theft, collusion, and some of the worst criminal behaviour imagineable, has been committed and Governments have taken a slow approach, and in other cases not seemed to pull their finger out at all.

I think its the comparison and rhetoric that really smells here, because lets be honest, administration isn’t shutting down the union, some people will lose their jobs, but the representation of workers will probably be maintained… in this present case.

I’d suggest that if there’s dirty behaviour that needs to be cleaned up, that would be a matter for the police. Not for the government to pass a bespoke bill disregarding the judiciary process for.

The interviewer seemed to have a line she was trying to follow, and Max Chandler-Mather wasn’t having a bar of it.

Max Chandler-Mather’s CFMEU rally antics have given Labor a political weapon to wield against the Greens By David Speers

This article from David Spears, i think, explains Ferguson’s line of questioning. Basically the ABC have drawn an optics comparison between that and Tony Abbott’s ditch the witch protest speech. And yeah there is similarity.

In both cases though, was it worth the media being distracted over the signs and forgetting the issues at hand?