Sounds like something out of a futuristic dystopian movie.

spoiler

I haven't seen a terrorism act invoked in my state but police have called a few designated areas this year and they bring the cavalry mounted troops to most protests.

I’m calling it now. Somebody’s gonna die or get seriously injured

Big ten-thousands protests generally try to be more big-tent than radical, so as eager as police are to make a show of force against anti-military protesters, my bet is that it will be limited to shoving. But honestly, I won't be shocked if your call turns out right.

lol - what abuse? He said these things in an earnings presentation, probably to board and investors.

Attempting to (softly) control other peoples' basic freedom, and their social life while at work, restricting them and alienating them from anything outside the office. The problem isn't their choice of words, nor that they admitted it to investors.

Maybe the way I'm saying this sounds melodramatic, that I'm jumping to the extreme case and assuming the worst. But those worst cases happen regularly, and these are the warning signs - when the owners want increasing control over workers to extract more profit, to "get the best out of them". Those employee pain points are social life: the company wants a childcare centre, a restaurant and a gym because "I don't want them leaving the building.", "I don't want them walking down the road for a cup of coffee. We kind of figured out a few years ago how much that costs." They could have lied and said they did it to improve worker wellbeing and get the best out of them, to reduce the travel-time needed, or any other seemingly innocent reason.

This attitude makes the universal truth clear, a board and investors see their workers as a resource for extracting maximum profit. It has to be that way, that's how they compete and survive. And it alienates workers.

And I don’t see any evidence anywhere that his people are enduring shit jobs.

I didn't say they were. I don't know their conditions. I'm refuting the common attitude that workers are just free to leave when they're being abused.

outrage reporting

You have a point. They said the quiet part aloud because their audience didn't need the propaganda bullshit they would have told other people. And so, they admitted an outrageous truth which, well, is pretty normal among businesses. The journalist is taking a quote and shining the headlights on them. But, they are not inventing a fake problem. There's no ethical justification for saying they don't want people leaving the building to enjoy a walk and a coffee on their break. Employer exploitation of workers is a real issue in society at large, it deserves attention, and this outrage is an opportunity to give it the attention it deserves.

There's a point made about how no courts were involved in the action. In wonder if the High Court has a pragmatic interest in stopping this kind of summary action. If the courts can be bypassed, what power will they have?

For those going to the CFMEU protest tomorrow, be advised the location has been changed to the Trades Hall due to expected large crowd.

Crosslinking: https://aussie.zone/post/12573641

Are the AFP employees (coppers) aware they are the wrong people to be handling this? They had an opportunity to help this kid, and instead just accelerated a terrorist operation until they could punish the victim.

This is very bad news for the worker movement.

The bottom line is that, despite their flaws, the CFMEU management enables construction workers to fight for better working conditions, including those working in roles where people regularly die in workplace incidents, where safety standards are a life and death matter. If they are replaced by a state-supplied dictator against the will of the workers which a union is created to represent, this introduces a conflict of interest somehow even worse than that in any of the accusations. We've seen in history how state-enforced class collaboration screws over workers. When employees are working for huge multinational companies like Lendlease, they need ways to defend themselves from all the corruption that comes with that. The CFMEU in its current state is not ideal, but it's a hell of a lot better than nothing, or one assigned by the government.

This has already had a chilling effect on the other more-militant trade unions, word-of-mouth is that some are asking members not to draw attention to themselves e.g. by flying banners at the recent NSW Labor conference. Giving the government this power to weaken unions at will is a horrible precedence which I sincerely believe will cost lives when it comes to safety regulations, let alone cost of living, preventing financial abuse of immigrant workers, and the inability to support social movement, such as the Green Bans of the BLF (who were deregistered in various states in 1986 and essentially brought into the coverage of what would become the CFMEU).

As some other mentioned, the monuments were often built soon after the war by people who had recently lost their relatives. When there were massacres of Aboriginal peoples, they obviously didn't have the authority and resources to build similar memorials in towns, and to be blunt, the towns probably had few people who cared enough to build anything on their behalf, even now there are few public memorials (and often small ones) of massacres and Aboriginal loss. And that difference you pointed out reveals a lot about we see the historical effects of who has power and who writes history.

Reorganised my fridge. Not only is it more pleasant and easier, but I no longer have to throw out unused milk. Also organized my pantry and now have enough storage that I can bulk-buy a few regularly-used items when they go down to half price.

Have you found a good bargain lately

Yeah I found the meeting room where my office keeps the gourmet visitor tea. (don't worry: if you've watched the news, ever, you don't like my employer either)

but open to other rabbit holes

If you like satirical comedy or entertaining educational shows, there's a lot on Australian television (particularly shows from the national Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Also, for people who enjoyed The Office (at least, the UK version, I haven't seen the US variant), I recommend Utopia - it's far from a clone but has a lot of similar themes of workplace life mixed with poking fun at bureaucracy and government.

but I don't live in australia, or have a VPN to access ABC iView!

Visit the sidebar resources of !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, or even just YouTube will get you a lot of them.

Anything we can do beyond spreading the news? I don't click, share, buy or even steal their content.

Are we going down the same path as US politics?

It depends what you mean, that's a vague and broad question. Societies are complex and there are obvious similarities and differences between our two systems, our two cultures and our two main parties.

For similarities, we both have 'liberal democracies', which positions our system as ultimately a popularity contest. So unfortunately, techniques used in other countries will be sold or copied over here. We saw this with different elections (US election, UK Brexit) all being involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. If it works and they aren't going to get caught, we'll copy it.

Another similarity is the heavy integration of capital in politics. You know, 'lobbying', media corporation backing, and all that. The US are further down that track, but it's just an inevitable consequence of capitalism - power tends towards groups with the most money. So politicians who please capitalists get exponentially more resources to dominate the mass media. This famous analysis of US mass media translates very well over to Australian mass media and politics.

As for differences, we overall seem to expect dignity and professionalism from politicians. For one example, we appear far less prone to electing celebrities. An exception that springs to mind is Peter Garrett, but even then they were famous for very political band, it's a different ballpark to Reagan, Schwarzenegger or Trump. While they're not the same, it is worth noting that Clive 'Discount Trump' Palmer didn't go far, even with massive campaign spending on advertisements.

As a final mention, we don't use a FPTP electoral system, so there isn't quite the same dominant federal two-party system of the USA. There are the dominant parties/coalitions, but Greens or Teals have shown themselves as able to seriously threaten Labor and Liberal parties for seats. So we don't get stuck between picking 'the lesser evil' like most of the US are pragmatically forced to. Some people in Australia praise compulsory voting, but I see preferential voting as far more important. Always improvements, but that alone puts our system at the forefront of 'liberal democracy' systems

There are currently no rules at either the state or federal level to stop political parties and candidates from using AI-generated material in election campaigns.

Why should there be? They already use video editing. The issue should be making misleading content, not which tool was used to make it. Mandate labeling it clearly to say it's not real footage.

Also I really hate TikTok.

That's how I feel about almost every social media platform. I even complain about Lemmy occasionally!