Energy saving light bulbs are a real turn off

• From: The Sunday Times

• May 19, 2012 10:54PM

 

Energy saving light globes have been blamed for increasing amounts of mercury in landfills. Picture: Craig Greenhill Source: The Daily Telegraph

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AUSTRALIA’S switch to low-energy light bulbs is creating a new environmental disaster as tonnes of the mercury-filled fluorescent lamps end up in council landfills.

With 95 per cent of discarded home light bulbs tossed into household rubbish bins, councils say there is an urgent need for a national scheme to recycle globes to ensure the mercury inside them does not find its way into water supply systems.

Mercury is one of the key ingredients of low-energy bulbs, but can cause neurological damage and birth defects if consumed by humans.

The lighting industry says the new bulbs contain just 5mg of mercury fluorescent tubes have three times that much but only 5 per cent of the bulbs are recycled.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/national/energy-saving-light-bulbs-are-a-real-turn-off/story-e6frfkvr-1226361151741#ixzz1vPi1oE2P

Price war to intensify as mobiles give power to buyers

Adele Ferguson

May 19, 2012

 

“Showrooming” … a new craze allowing shoppers to compare prices by scanning barcodes. Photo: Joe Armao

IMAGINE walking into a department store, trying on a pair of shoes or moisturiser, then pointing your mobile phone at the barcode to get a list of real time pricing information from competitors offering the same pair of shoes or facial cream a few dollars cheaper just a few doors away.

It is a phenomenon known as ”showrooming” and it is causing headaches for traditional retailers in the US, who are already under siege from the online price discounting that has wreaked havoc with their business models. For customers, the mobile commerce apps give them even greater power to compare prices while they are shopping.

In Australia, a few retailers have started experimenting with mobile apps but they have a long way to go to catch up to US retailers, says Paul Budde, a telecom consultant at BuddeComm.

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Mr Budde estimates smartphones have more than 50 per cent penetration, which means it is only a matter of time before the apps are offered in Australia.

Woolworths was the first big retailer to launch an app last August, with limited offerings, which included the ability for customers to scan a product’s barcode with their smartphone, add it to their shopping list and then order and pay for their groceries, which are home delivered.

Big W went a step further and launched a mobile app in November, with a feature enabling customers to scan a product in any competitor’s store and get the comparable price at Big W. In the next few weeks, it plans to expand the price comparison to over 60,000 products and offer detailed product information on more than 20,000 items.

A spokeswoman for Big W, Clare Buchanan, said the upgrades will connect to online shopping to enable customers to compare prices as well as buy instantly from Big W for home delivery or layby.

”It will also give customers tracking information about the progress of their order and SMS them when it’s about to be delivered – this feature alone is anticipated to reduce call centre volumes by about 25 per cent,” she said.

Sportsgirl is another early adopter of mobile commerce. The group’s strategic brand manager, Prue Thomas, said the decision to introduce a mobile app was a no brainer and it was growing faster than website sales.

”Our girls are on the phones 24/7 and we should be too. They can purchase as much as they want from the mobile. If they are in a store that doesn’t have the product, they can use the mobile to order it,” she said.

Ms Thomas said Sportsgirl sees the mobile not as a threat but an opportunity.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/price-war-to-intensify-as-mobiles-give-power-to-buyers-20120518-1yw15.html#ixzz1vPM6tw5k

Labor MPs push for dole increase

Misha Schubert and Stephanie Peatling

May 20, 2012

 

Many Labor MPs believe the $245 weekly unemployment benefit payment is too low. Photo: Virginia Star

PRIME Minister Julia Gillard faces a growing push from Labor MPs to raise the dole, with warnings it is so low that people are being forced into poverty and even turning to crime.

A quarter of the Labor backbench have told The Sunday Age in the past week that $245 a week is too little to live on – a stance backed by conservative economic commentators and business groups.

”Anyone can end up on welfare given changed circumstances and bad luck, and the Labor Party should always have in its eye that people who fall on hard times can live with some dignity and respect,” New South Wales senator Doug Cameron said.

Northern Territory senator Trish Crossin even called for a welfare summit, like last year’s tax summit, to examine the entire system of payments and allowances.

Victorian Labor MP Darren Cheeseman said the dole – which is $133 a week less than the age pension and $344 a week below the minimum wage – was so low people couldn’t afford to get to job interviews or present well at them. Increasingly, they were people who had worked for decades before losing a job.

”And when you get into pockets of poverty … what I am being presented with is people saying they think their neighbours have turned to crime to make ends meet and they wouldn’t normally do that,” he said.

Tasmanian Dick Adams said it was ”really hard to manage” on so little money. ”If you’re on it for 12 months, that’d be pretty difficult,” he said.

Laurie Ferguson from NSW said when even people who had jobs were complaining about the rising cost of living, ”just imagine how hard it is for people on the dole”.

Labor said in the budget two weeks ago that it would push 100,000 single mothers off parenting payments and onto the dole once their youngest child turned eight. Such families will be $120 a fortnight worse off. That move has stirred anew the debate on the dole.

The push includes many from the Labor Left, but some right-wing MPs concede they are also concerned. Canberra MP Gai Brodtmann said her community was telling her the dole was too low, and she would convey that to ministers. One figure on the Right who did not want to be named said it was ”vexing” that Labor had joined the orthodoxy of ”stigmatising” people on the dole.

Yet other MPs on the Right such as Joel Fitzgibbon, Nick Champion and Chris Hayes did not back a rise, saying the best form of welfare was a job. ”People aren’t knocking down the door saying Newstart is too low,” Mr Hayes said.

Some senior government figures privately concede the dole is too low but say a rise cannot be afforded.

Over the past six months, an unlikely chorus of conservative political figures and economists has emerged to declare the dole inadequate. They include conservative economists Judith Sloan and Ian Harper, and Liberal stalwart Hugh Morgan.

Business Council of Australia chief Jennifer Westacott told The Sunday Age there was a ”crude view that somehow if you make payments really inadequate that’s an incentive to get back into work. Well, $50 a week is hardly going to change someone’s views about work incentives.

”People have lost their confidence and their health. They don’t have money to get to interviews; they don’t have clothes,” she said.

Welfare groups have long been pushing for a $50 a week boost to Newstart, which has not had a real increase – one above inflation – since 1994.

MPs concerned about the changes plan to raise the issue again on Tuesday in Labor caucus.

”If you’ve got senior business people saying it’s not sufficient, that makes it clear something’s got to be done,” Illawarra-based MP Stephen Jones said.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/labor-mps-push-for-dole-increase-20120519-1yxtq.html#ixzz1vO643faK

What’s your type? A bomber or a kisser, you are what you email

May 20, 2012Opinion

<P.< p>Photo: James Brickwood

Email correspondence has spawned a whole new genus of office personalities.

EMAIL. Was there ever a more delightful, terrifying, treacherous invention?

My email inbox currently has 20,000 unread messages. Even when you discount Twitter updates, press releases from Joe Ludwig (my favourite this week: a transcript of the minister’s speech to the Pan Pacific Pork Expo, along the theme “Positioning Australian Pork”), spam from the real estate agent to whom I incautiously gave my address five years ago when I was trying to buy a house, and that guy who emails his expletive-studded views on federal politics unbidden every single morning and with whom I am loath to establish electronic eye contact for long enough to ask him to desist, that’s still several thousand potentially interesting things that have simply escaped my eye.

New ones arrive; dozens an hour. I try to fish out the human ones, but my system isn’t perfect.

‘Email has unleashed a great parade of office freaks.’ Photo: Phil Carrick

Reading Gideon Haigh’s completely enchanting new book, The Office: A Hardworking History, which is a romp through the inkstands and cubicles of the evolving human workspace, it strikes me that email hasn’t so much provided a new chapter in the story of the office, so much as expanded the office into every corner of life.

The office is there, with its stentorian commands, every time you check your inbox on the train, or in the playground, or on the dunny.

And email has unleashed – or at least powerfully invigorated – a grand new parade of office freaks and personality disorders, over a stunningly short period of time.

“People have had about 50,000 years’ experience in the use of speech and gestures, 5000 years’ experience in writing and about 100 years of the telephone,” explains an expert quoted by Haigh.

But email’s only been around for five seconds, in evolutionary terms, and now – in the absence of any firm etiquette – it’s spawned a whole genus of new office characters. Let me give you a few examples.

The Inclusionist: The Inclusionist feels that no email is really worthwhile unless it has a CC list that looks like a call sheet for the Leveson inquiry. Everyone from the mail room to the boardroom is therefore copied in on the vital question of T-shirt design for the Family Fun Day, or the disappearance of the cake knife from the kitchenette on level three. Recipients who fantasise about sinking the missing implement between the shoulder blades of the well-meaning messenger may feel guilt about this reflex, but shouldn’t.

The Stealth Bomber: Is essentially The Inclusionist, switched to “evil” mode. The Stealth Bomber sends a pleasantly worded mild rebuke advising the recipient that she has missed a deadline, or disappointed a client in some respect, or tripped up on some minor occupational health and safety matter, all of which seems moderate to reasonable until the recipient realises that every single person senior to her in the organisation has been included in the CC list. Kaboom!

The Midnight Martyr: Sends emails in the middle of the night or – better – in the grey predawn hours, thereby creating the impression of round-the-clock industry. Typically, the emails are trivial in nature; the reader is thus encouraged to infer that the writer is not up at this hour because it’s an emergency, but is simply exercising his habitual preference for work over flabby, human indulgences like sleep.

A tip for young players: If you yearn to improve your reputation for assiduity by attempting a little Midnight Martyrdom, do not take a strong drink first. Midnight Mumbledom creates an entirely different effect.

The Passive-Aggressive Warrior: Will send an office-wide email kindly offering to purchase a new coffee mug for the person who keeps using hers, and then abandoning it in the sink with a sticky sludge of International Roast down the bottom. The PAW may well mention – in the course of the email – her own perfect record of cleaning up after herself, and the fact that she understands people are busy. She may also mention that she has her suspicions about the identity of the culprit. The suspect, incidentally, is probably sitting not more than two desks away but will at no point be engaged in direct discussion by the PAW.

The Over-Kisser: Self-explanatory. Will attach cyber-smooches to any missive, no matter how inappropriate. I am an over-kisser. I finally realised this when I sent an outline for this very column to my editor, and signed off with an “x”.

The Rehearser: Will spend an hour and a half carefully drafting a reply to any of the above-mentioned types of correspondents. The reply – written with verve, confidence, and flashes of Wildean wit – may analyse the original correspondent’s own failings in some depth, and will certainly conclude with a devastating one-liner. Having crafted this utterly satisfying response, The Rehearser will then delete the lot, and return miserably to work.

■Annabel Crabb writes for ABC online’s The Drum, and tweets as @annabelcrabb

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/whats-your-type-a-bomber-or-a-kisser-you-are-what-you-email-20120519-1yxm5.html#ixzz1vO4bd6LP

Situation ‘normal’: time to put fiscal policies away

May 19, 2012

 

Secretary of the Treasury, Dr Martin Parkinson. Photo: Andrew Meares

The Treasury says managing demand is the affair of monetary policy.

IN CASE you missed it, the secretary to the Treasury has spelt it out: with the budget’s planned return to surplus next financial year, fiscal policy is being put back in the cupboard and the ”policy mix” returned to ”normal”.

In his annual post-budget speech, Dr Martin Parkinson outlined the ”macroeconomic framework” – the respective roles of fiscal policy (the manipulation of government spending and taxation) and monetary policy (the manipulation of interest rates by the Reserve Bank).

”The primary responsibility for managing demand to keep the economy on a stable growth path consistent with low inflation” had been allocated to monetary policy, he said.

So, ”normal” is for monetary policy to be doing most of the work in keeping the economy steady. Its aim is ”to maintain inflation between 2 and 3 per cent, on average, over the cycle”. But, as you see, this doesn’t mean the Reserve focuses on inflation to the exclusion of all else.

While keeping inflation low may be the target, the goal is non-inflationary growth – growth that should keep unemployment low.

And a key part of the mechanism for achieving low inflation and steady, job-creating growth is, in Parkinson’s words, ”anchoring inflation expectations”.

But if monetary policy is the main policy instrument used to keep the economy on an even keel, what is fiscal policy’s role?

Parkinson says its key objective is ”to maintain fiscal stability from a medium-term perspective”. That is, to ensure we don’t run so many budget deficits that, in time, we build up a level of government debt that becomes unsustainable.

But this is Parko’s key message: ”Outside of the automatic stabilisers, discretionary fiscal policy should only be used for supporting demand during extreme circumstances, such as when: the effectiveness of monetary policy is impeded; and/or a shock is sufficiently large and sufficiently sudden that monetary and fiscal policy should work together to support activity, such as during the global financial crisis.”

Let’s unpack that mouthful. As we saw here last weekend, the budget contains ”automatic stabilisers” that cause the budget balance to deteriorate when the economy turns down and improve when the economy turns up. So, the budget acts automatically to stabilise the economy as it moves through the business cycle – public sector demand expands automatically at times when private sector demand is weak, and contracts automatically when private demand is strong.

The next element in Parko’s exposition of fiscal policy’s role is that governments may take discretionary measures that reinforce the effect of the stabilisers, but only in extreme circumstances. In other words, apart from allowing the stabilisers to do their thing, it’s not normal practice for fiscal policy to be used to manage the strength of demand from year to year. That’s the job of monetary policy, for which it’s better suited (because it can be adjusted quickly and easily and in small or large steps).

Parkinson says we’ve had such a ”medium-term” approach since the mid-1980s, ”before evolving into a fully articulated framework with the development of [Peter Costello's] Charter of Budget Honesty”.

The charter requires the government of the day to announce a ”medium-term fiscal strategy” and Wayne Swan’s strategy is only marginally different from Costello’s: ”to achieve budget surplus, on average, over the medium term”.

This formulation is designed to allow the automatic stabilisers to push the budget into deficit during recessions provided the stabilisers are unimpeded in returning the budget to surplus and any stimulus spending is ended.

This means that, over time, all the deficits incurred during downturns are roughly offset by all the surpluses achieved during upswings. The surpluses are used to pay off the deficits, thus keeping the level of government debt steady and sustainable over time.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/business/situation-normal-time-to-put-fiscal-policies-away-20120518-1yw74.html#ixzz1vO3njPFp

Whatever it takes: the fight to save the euro

Rebecca Christie

May 20, 2012

 

‘Extraordinary importance’ … the US President, Barack Obama, listens to his French counterpart, Francois Hollande. Photo: Reuters

The European Union has the tools and the will to protect the euro and fight the bloc’s sovereign debt crisis, the European Council President, Herman Van Rompuy, and European Union President, Jose Barroso, declared yesterday.

For now, the EU is ”determined to stay the course” and continue its efforts to cut deficits across the 27-nation union, while also honouring commitments made to Greece, Mr Van Rompuy said yesterday before attending the Group of Eight summit in the US.

He defended the EU’s ability to take further action as necessary.

”We will do whatever needed to guarantee the financial stability of the eurozone,” Mr Van Rompuy said, speaking at Camp David, the presidential retreat outside Washington.

The European leaders will need to reassure their G8 counterparts that they are doing enough to contain financial turmoil that has spread from Greece to Ireland, Portugal and Spain. Almost $US4 trillion was wiped from global equity markets this month amid speculation that Greece would exit the euro, and recession and loan losses led Moody’s Investors Services to downgrade 16 Spanish banks last week.

The G8 includes the US, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and Russia. The EU also has two seats.

Mr Barroso said the eurozone had taken whatever actions were needed to deal with the crisis, overhauling its economic governance and changing course when necessary.

”Sometimes these efforts are underestimated,” he said at the Camp David news conference.

For example, he said, the euro area created the €500 billion ($645 billion) European Stability Mechanism, a rescue fund that is due to start in July, as part of the bloc’s financial firewall. ”That was completely unthinkable two years ago, and it was done in the middle of the crisis,” Mr Barroso said.

EU leaders will press forward on efforts to stimulate economic growth at a May 23 dinner in Brussels, followed by a formal summit in June. Mr Barroso said the group aimed to move ahead with proposals to strengthen the European Investment Bank and to make investments to spur job creation.

”Plan A” was for Greece to stay in the eurozone, Mr Barroso said. At the same time, the leaders said Greek authorities need to keep meeting the EU’s aid conditions as they seek to form a government.

”As regards Greece, I do not hide my concern about the current political uncertainty,” Mr Van Rompuy said. ”Continued reform is the best guarantee for the Greek economy and for the future of the Greek people in the euro area.”

He said that Spain and Italy are making progress on efforts to shore up their economies.

”I am confident they will succeed,” he said.

Greece will go the polls on June 17.

The EU leaders will also talk to the US President, Barack Obama, about whether there will be any need to tap strategic petroleum reserves to combat potential spikes in oil prices. The subject is being discussed as the US and its allies prepare for the imposition of an EU embargo on Iranian oil from July 1.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/business/whatever-it-takes-the-fight-to-save-the-euro-20120520-1yylg.html#ixzz1vO3500d1

‘So far so good’: Obama on summit to tackle economic crisis

May 20, 2012 – 9:00A

 

Aussie dollar shows resistance to Europe woes

World leaders discuss Europe’s economic woes

US President Barack Obama says a “stable, growing European economy is in everybody’s best interest,” meeting with world leaders outside of Washington.

Confronting an economic crisis that threatens them all, President Barack Obama and leaders of other world powers have declared that their governments must both spark growth and cut the debt that has crippled the European continent and put investors worldwide on edge.

“So far so good,” Obama proclaimed after economic talks at Camp David, his secluded and highly secure mountaintop retreat. He played international host in the midst of a re-election bid that will turn on the economy, underscoring his stakes in getting his allies abroad to rally around some answers.

Yet there were no bold prescriptions at hand. Instead, leaders seemed intent on trying to inspire confidence by agreeing on a broad strategy no matter their differences.

G8 leaders at Camp David: from left, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, French President Francois Hollande, US President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and European Council president Herman van Rompuy. Photo: AFP

Coping with shaky oil markets, the leaders set the stage for a united release of national oil reserves to balance any disruption in world markets when tough new sanctions are imposed on Iran’s exports because of its disputed nuclear program. The leaders said they were ready to take “appropriate action” to meet any shortages.

The mere preparation to release oil reserves could help calm markets and ensure that oil prices, which have been dropping, don’t climb again and anger consumers as US elections approach.

The Group of Eight summit includes leaders of the United States, Japan, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Russia.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel came to the summit as the European leader who had demanded austerity as the most important step toward easing the eurozone’s debt crisis. But the election of Socialist Francois Hollande as president of France, and Greek elections that created political chaos in the country, were clear rejections of the belt-tightening Merkel represented.

Merkel said growth and deficit-cutting reinforced each other and that everyone around the table agreed.

“That is great progress,” she said. As for promoting growth, she said investments under consideration include research and development, internet networks and infrastructure. But she said “this doesn’t mean stimulus in the usual sense”.

US officials agreed, saying growth measures that the Europeans might pursue don’t all require outright public spending, and could be in the form of public-private partnerships or in initiatives designed to loosen credit.

A joint summit statement reflected how urgently the countries must contain a financial crisis that could spread from the eurozone to the United States and infect the rest of the global economy. They declared unanimity in ensuring that Greece, which is crippled in debt and politically gridlocked, remains as part of 17-member euro currency union.

“The global economic recovery shows signs of promise, but significant headwinds persist,” said G8 leaders said. Yet with all of them facing their own difficult political realities, they built some sovereign wiggle room into their pledge to take all necessary steps, saying “the right measures are not the same for each of us”.

The tension between austerity and growth – whether to slash debt by cutting budgets or use public money and other means to help spur economic growth – was the backdrop as Obama welcomed an emerging push for a balance between the two.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/business/world-business/so-far-so-good-obama-on-summit-to-tackle-economic-crisis-20120520-1yyie.html#ixzz1vO1ZYoHf

Graduates shun legal profession

Jane Lee

May 20, 2012

 

Many law students have no intention of becoming lawyers. Photo: Louise Kennerley

ALMOST two-thirds of Australia’s law graduates are not working as lawyers four months after they have completed their degrees, according to a study.

The Graduate Careers Australia survey of 1313 recent graduates from all over the country found that 64 per cent were not practising law between 2010 and 2011.

There was ”no way” law firms could accommodate all the graduates from Australia’s 31 law schools, La Trobe University’s director of undergraduate studies, Heather King, said. ”It’s a well-acknowledged fact that 40-50 per cent will not end up in a traditional law practice.”

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Ms King denied this was problematic, as law degrees gave students a transferable set of skills in research, writing and problem solving.

More students were taking alternative routes – including studying practical law subjects at the Leo Cussen Centre for Law and the College of Law – to become a lawyer after graduation, she said.

”Law firms are not taking on the same numbers of supervised workplace traineeship positions … there’s intense competition, so students are thinking more creatively about their future career options,” she said.

But managing editor of advice website SurviveLaw.com, Kathryn Crossley, 24, said that many law students simply did not aspire to become lawyers.

”Competition for roles in large commercial law firms is always going to be strong. I don’t have any specific studies I can point to but anecdotally I’d say a very high number of law students aren’t going into practice and it’s not because they can’t find work but rather because they’re choosing not to.”

Meanwhile, the number of coveted law school positions has fallen 3.4 per cent this year, from 7135 to 6890, despite the federal government’s abolition of a cap on university enrolment placements. The decline can be partly explained by universities’ introduction of the postgraduate Juris Doctor law degree. Some Australian law schools are gradually moving away from undergraduate degrees to offering positions to postgraduate students exclusively in line with Canada and the US.

As more mature-age students enter law school, a greater proportion could become clearer about future career paths. But law students who start university straight after high school – particularly those doing double degrees – often feel confused about which path to take, Ms Crossley said.

”There is a lot of emphasis in a law faculty on graduate law jobs and getting legal experience, so it can be quite a conflicting feeling,” she said.

Many students struggled with both the academic challenges of law school and the knowledge they will not use it to become a lawyer at the end of it.

Alana Smith studied at Monash University hoping to become a human rights lawyer. But she soon found that she lacked an attention to detail crucial to the profession, and it was former High Court justice and human rights advocate Michael Kirby who made her realise she did not ultimately want to become a lawyer.

”Justice Kirby said to be a good human rights lawyer you’ve got to love the law and you’ve got to love legislation and I was like ‘Oh, god, I’m in trouble’.” Ms Smith, 26, graduated in 2009 and is now a consultant at a public policy agency, Synergistiq.

”I remember doing a policy internship for the UNHCR and I just felt frustrated because I was learning stuff but I felt it wasn’t the best way for me to change the world,” she said.

A sense of disillusionment is not exclusive to the Australian law industry. Robert Kurson, a law graduate of Harvard University – home to the most expensive law school in the world – tracked down a number of his fellow alumni from the class of 1990 and found that less than half of them worked in law firms, with about a quarter of those qualified as lawyers not practising.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/graduates-shun-legal-profession-20120519-1yxt0.html#ixzz1vO0eXaRM

A trusted messenger steps forward to rebuke Labor

May 19, 2012Opinion

Hitting home: Former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty. Photo: Lee Besford

Kelty’s message carried heavy freight; few could doubt his Labor credentials. During the Hawke and Keating years, he gave two important speeches that bookended their time in office. In 1983, only weeks after the Hawke government was elected, his contribution to the national economic summit paved the way for business, the unions and all but one of the states to sign up for a common policy prescription to find a way out of a deep recession. Kelty had pledged that the unions would moderate and even stall their wage campaigns in the interest of reviving and transforming the economy. His appearance helped to set up the new Labor government for a period of considerable success.

The other significant speech came during the dying days of Labor’s 13 years in power, at a union rally at the Melbourne Town Hall in the 1996 election campaign. The Keating government was headed for defeat, and Labor and the unions knew it. Kelty addressed the prospect of a Howard government. He warned that if the Coalition wanted to wipe out industrial protections for workers in favour of individual contracts, a dispute the previous year at Weipa over private contracts would merely be ”the first sonata”. Looking across the stage at Keating, he said: ”If they want a fight, if they want a war, they’ll have the full symphony – all the pieces, all the clashes and all the music. I am not sure it will be the 1812 Overture, but I will tell you what, Paul, it will not be Mahler either.”

It took a while, but Kelty’s warning of a full-scale war eventually came to pass. The ACTU’s campaign against John Howard’s WorkChoices laws – exactly the type of legislation he had been talking about in 1996 – played a major role in ensuring the removal of the Coalition government in 2007.

What Kelty told the ACTU dinner this week was the sort of straight talk that has eluded the labour movement, and, in particular, the federal government, for far too long. When he was ACTU secretary, Kelty always saw Labor’s mission as being tougher to effect than the Coalition’s. For the ALP, being in office was inevitably hard graft, and it was to be expected that circumstances and enemies would conspire to frustrate it.

In his speech, Kelty harked back to the economic conditions facing the previous Labor government and noted how confidence in the ALP had been lost. ”Real pressures on living standards, high unemployment; but we never, ever lost a sense of hope and trust that governments and unions would see it out and there would be a better future. Today, we have better economic conditions, but that hope and that trust has retreated.”

He was utterly dismissive of the excuses now being trotted out by the Labor Party and many of its supporters for the federal government’s poor standing. ”I’ve got to be frank: it’s too easy to blame the media, too easier [sic] to blame the playthings of politics. And there’s no purpose blaming the opposition for doing what, after all, you would expect them to do, and that’s to beat you.

”In a sense, I think we make politics just simply too hard. The truth will normally do. This is a transition in the Australian economy that for many people will be very hard, but the truth is also this: that the very best people to manage that transition is a Labor Party, it is unions, it is managing in a Labor way.”

Lastly, Kelty deplored the defeatist mindset that has taken hold across the government and the unions. ”It is too easy to accept defeat, too easy to say the Labor Party will not win. [Keating] won when nobody said he would win. So whenever people say you’re put down or you’re going to get beaten or you’re going to get destroyed, the one thing you always should say is: ‘never without a fight’.”

This was a profound critique of the Gillard government’s political outlook, for several reasons. Only a day earlier, Julia Gillard, in her own address to the ACTU, had put the government’s unpopularity down to public anxiety in the wake of the global financial crisis, opposition scaremongering and the media. On the opposition, she said: ”I understand that Australians have been screamed at now by the opposition for more than a year. They’ve been told that they need to be very afraid, they’ve been screamed at relentlessly, and we all know a good fear campaign when we see one.”

On the media and its ”dramatic reporting” she said: ”… I do understand, as I’m sure you understand as well, the frustration that can come from the headlines in the daily newspapers where, when you look at those headlines, with all of their horror, the schlock and horror that modern media reporting runs to, that the achievements of this minority Parliament aren’t seen for what they are.”

Kelty repudiated Gillard’s assessment of her own political plight, although he stopped short of nominating the root cause of Labor’s malaise. But little effort is needed to work out where his analysis rests. If the Liberals, Nationals and media are not to blame, surely only the government itself is left.

The Prime Minister’s course is clear: more of the same. And then more. No change. She will keep going, she will not be deterred. It’s 15 months since she confirmed that the government had committed to the Greens’ preferred policy of a carbon tax.

Since then, Labor’s collapse in every available opinion poll has been calamitous. In the 15 Nielsen/Age polls in that time, the Coalition’s biggest lead after preferences was 22 per cent and its average lead has been 12.6 per cent. Its smallest lead was 6 per cent in February this year, when speculation about Kevin Rudd returning to the Labor leadership was at its height.

Once Rudd was dispatched by the caucus at the end of February, the Coalition’s lead returned immediately to around its normal level of 14 per cent. Just to make it clear, that’s a 57-43 result – potentially one of the greatest wipeouts in federal political history.

What is the caucus going to do? At the ACTU congress, the Prime Minister’s message to the unions was to ignore the government’s rampant unpopularity in the community and to focus instead on the process. ”We have a plan for the country. We are getting on with the job. I am determined that we deliver that plan because it will make a difference for all Australians.” She then recommended that Labor and the unions ”stiffen our spine and we get on with the work that working Australians want us to do”.

There is no doubt about the Prime Minister’s determination and her personal resolve. But there is a point when toughness and resilience become stubbornness, all too often a demeaning, self-defeating quality. Kelty called on the labour movement to fight. Gillard called on Labor people to stay clam, and blame the media and Tony Abbott’s scare campaign.

Who will the caucus listen to?

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/a-trusted-messenger-steps-forward-to-rebuke-labor-20120518-1yw5j.html#ixzz1vO00WV6D

Social media is reinventing how business is done

By Tim Mullaney, USA TODAY

Updated 3d 1h ago

 

When Red Robin Gourmet Burgers introduced its new Tavern Double burger line last month, the company had to get everything right. So it turned to social media.

• By Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY

Taaron Nichols delivers a Tavern Double Burger at s Red Robin in Valencia, Calif.

The 460-restaurant chain used an internal social network that resembles Facebook to teach its managers everything from the recipes to the best, fastest way to make them. Instead of mailing out spiral-bound books, getting feedback during executives’ sporadic store visits and taking six months to act on advice from the trenches, the network’s freewheeling discussion and video produced results in days. Red Robin is already kitchen-testing recipe tweaks based on customer feedback — and the four new sandwiches just hit the table April 30.

Facebook’s initial public offering Friday — the largest by a technology company — is a watershed moment for the consumer side of the Web, but social networking’s real economic impact might be ahead as companies learn how to harness “social business” tools.

Beyond advertising on Facebook or Twitter, companies are using social networks to build teams that solve problems faster, share information better among their employees and partners, bring customer ideas for new product designs to market earlier, and redesign all kinds of corporate software in Facebook’s easy-to-learn style.

“At a very basic level, Facebook is the most popular application ever, with a billion people who know how to use it,” said Marc Benioff, chief executive of salesforce.com, whose Chatter social-networking tools are used by 150,000 companies. “The ability to access information is much better because it’s easier to get to it.”

After a slow start, Big Business is embracing social media in a big way. Forrester Research says the sales of software to run corporate social networks will grow 61% a year and be a $6.4 billion business by 2016.

Two-thirds of big companies surveyed now use Web 2.0 tools such as social networks or blogs, with use of internal social networks up 50% since 2008, according to a survey by McKinsey & Co. Nearly 90% said they have reaped at least one measurable business benefit, though most say the improvements have been modest.

Heavy use of social tools has a statistically significant correlation to profitability, said Michael Chui, senior fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute. But it’s early: Only about 3% of respondents used social business tools for all three major uses — reaching customers, connecting employees and coordinating with suppliers, McKinsey said.

The Social Web seems to be doing a different job in Corporate America than the first-generation Web. In the late 1990s, companies such as Wal-Mart used the Internet to streamline supply chains and better manage inventories to hold down prices. Banks used the new technology to cut the cost of processing mortgages by as much as two-thirds, by eliminating clerical workers and substituting e-mail for expensive overnight deliveries. If Web 1.0 automated routine processes and warehouses, Web 2.0 is about organizing design work and creativity, said Andrew McAfee, professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School.

“We asked ourselves where would social networking go once everyone had a Facebook account?” said David Sacks, president of San Francisco-based Yammer, whose software runs Red Robin’s internal social network. “Big ideas always move from the consumer market into the enterprise market.”

“Innovation is a two-way street,” said Chris Laping, Red Robin’s senior vice president for business transformation. “When people see things, they feel things. And when they feel things, they change.”

Making connections

Using social networks to foster connections lets companies match the skills of people working all over the world who wouldn’t easily find each other, said Eric Lesser, a research director at IBM’s Institute for Business Value. It’s especially valuable for companies built by acquisition, whose managers in different divisions often don’t know each other, he said.

Take SuperValu, a collection of supermarket chains ranging from Shaw’s in Boston to Albertsons in California. SuperValu last year used Yammer to build a network to connect 11,000 executives and store managers, chief information officer Wayne Shurts said. They’ve organized themselves into more than 1,000 groups to talk about specific challenges.

For example, 182 managers from different chains joined a group to mull common problems of running markets in college towns. Another 153 banded together to talk about running stores in beach communities, where business is seasonal. Those didn’t replace any other process, because there was no way to do it before: The managers couldn’t all be pulled from their stores for retreats or meetings, and the cost of getting them together would have been prohibitive, Shurts said.

One result: A promotion at college-oriented stores that sold 8,000 $99 mini-refrigerators last fall, each stuffed with $99 worth of coupons to bring the customers back for food. Another discussion led to college-town “beer pong” displays packaging ping-pong balls, red Solo cups and brewskis to fill them up. Both ideas were floated last spring and ready by August, he said.

“You’ve got to let the conversations happen, even if you might not like all of that conversation,” Shurts said. “It’s going to happen around the water cooler anyway.”

Listening to customers

Companies can also use blogs and social sites to bring customers into their product-design process, said Barton George, director of the Dell computer division that sells to Internet-based companies. Through its IdeaStorm site, Dell has taken in more than 17,000 ideas for new or improved products, and has adopted nearly 500, including backlit keyboards that are better for working on airplanes.

Other times, Dell puts its own ideas on IdeaStorm, in what it calls a Storm Session, to get feedback before going ahead. On May 6, Dell posted a plan on IdeaStorm describing a proposed specialty laptop, upgrading an existing machine to target people who write wireless apps and other Web-based software using a variation of the Linux operating system called Ubuntu, George said.

By Monday, customers had posted 83 ideas for refinements to the machine on IdeaStorm, covering specific software bugs to broader issues such as whether the screen should be shiny or not. In addition, 35,000 people visited George’s Web posting about the new laptop — 10 times more than any other posting he’s ever made, he said. The laptop is due on the market by year’s end. Dell says the process produces more detailed feedback than traditional focus groups, and builds links to an important group of customers.

So far, the social Web hasn’t boosted U.S. productivity growth the way the first-generation Internet did in the late 1990s. But economists such as MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson say it takes about five years for a new technology to show its full impact on companies that deploy it. Social networking is about two or three years in at most companies, McAfee said.

Companies are tinkering with the technology and their own business processes, trying to find ways to match them up to get the most impact and learn how to interpret all the unorganized data users disclose about themselves on the sites, Lesser said.

In the meantime, the trend has already generated one IPO for a smaller company, Jive Software, that sells social-networking tools to companies. Jive went public at $12 a share in December and now trades around $19.50, achieving a $1.2 billion market value, though it’s not yet profitable.

Facebook hasn’t actively pursued the social business market. It let companies such as Yammer and Jive mimic its look and feel, because making Facebook-like features an industry standard helped cement Facebook’s leadership in consumer social networks, Yammer’s Sacks said.

Social media has the potential to be as important to the broader economy as more obviously business-related information technologies such as mobile phones and cloud computing, said Stacey Bishop, a venture capitalist at Scale Venture Partners, in Foster City, Calif.

“I’d put the cloud first, but they’re all important and they’re all related,” Bishop said. “Mobile is an extension of the cloud, because it lets you get your data wherever you are. And social is the layer on top of that, making it easier to cross-communicate.”

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/story/2012-05-14/social-media-economy-companies/55029088/1?goback=%2Egde_82242_member_116295931