The national secretary of the Health Services Union, patriot Kathy Jackson has done her best today to spice up the boring pages of The Aged with an attack on Premier John Brumby.
The OC admits a great bias when it comes to Kathy, we like her combative and stylish ways but we find ourselves disagreeing with some of her argument.
The piece is motivated by the delays and incompetence the union has experienced in dealing with the Health Department in their recent pay claim.
Personalising the issue around the Premier is a way of getting attention to their cause. It's certainly the most effective way of getting press interest, whether it's an effective industrial tactic we'll soon see.
Jackson has recently shifted from being the state secretary of a part of the Health Services Union responsible for health professionals like radiographers and scientists to the national secretary's position.
She is understandably keen to move on from the former to focus on the latter but is certainly not interested in shafting her members in the process. It appears that she has struggled to get sense out of those responsible for the bargaining in the Department.
LET'S GIVE DANIEL ANDREWS A KICKING
The sad truth is that this is Health Minister Daniel Andrews' mess not the Premier's.
The Minister presides over a scandalous situation where very senior bureaucrats in the Health Department who are entrusted to do the people's business in the administration of the health system actually have another and conflicting.
A number of key industrial relations managers in the department are former officials of the Australian Nurses Federation or of left-wing unions sympathetic to the ANF. Some are married to current officials of that union. The result is that whatever the nurses want, they get. And others with pay and conditions claims to make get considered very much as a lower priority.
Call me old-fashioned but I call that corruption.
These people treat the nurses union with kid gloves, yet happily sue the Health Services Union using the same Howard government legislation they probably decry at North Fitzroy dinner parties.
And we'll be producing a list of names of bureaucrats involved in this rather sordid conflict of interests very soon.
But while the cardigans are up to no good, Daniel Andrews was responsible. And his predecessor Bronwyn Pike.
Nurses are wonderful people. My mum was one. But there ought be no corrupt sweetheart deals for them and their powerful union at the expense of taxpayers, patients and other important stakeholders in the health system.
WHERE WE DISAGREE WITH ACTION JACKSON
Rather than praising mostly left-wing and mostly disastrous trade union reform groups (consider the collapse in membership in the union previously known as the Federated Clerks Union, it practically collapsed and died under its left-wing leadership despite areas of its coverage exploding in growth) and defending bumbling buffoonish Liberal wettards like Malcolm Fraser and Ted Baillieu, she should be blowing the whistle on this corrupt arrangement in the industrial unit of the Health Department.
Make no mistake, state Liberal leader Ted Baillieu is a dead man walking. And don't believe for a second that the astute Kathy Jackson thinks otherwise. She's played him like a grand piano in the Baillieu mansion ballroom. If she'd wanted to deal with an alternative Premier she would have been much better off talking with Liberal Andrew McIntosh or Terry Mulder. But in getting the government's attention, having a chat with Red Ted was more than enough.
Governments need to balance lots of competing interests carefully. And it's not an easy to do, as the government is facing a potentially nasty economic downturn. So we can have some sympathy for the efforts to avoid spending money. But there's clearly a problem with decision making in the Health Department when it comes to industrial relations and any Health Minister worth his Clark Kent glasses would be alive to the problem and determined to get rid of it and those responsible.
Does the government have the hubris wittily diagnosed by Jackson? Not it seems to me at its top levels. They all seem to me to be pre-occupied by getting things right for a very testing election in 2010.
Is that true of every ministerial adviser? Clearly not, many of them don't have a clue, with the occasional patriotic exception. Although the recent forced departure of leftard Louise Perry from the media unit gives us some reassurance that things are improving there.
But there' plenty hubris with government bureaucrats who have a massive conflict of interests in their dealings with one particular union and think they won't be called on it.
We have news for them, an OC hunting party is on its way.
Game on.
|