- The Guardian
- Issue #2202
Flawed
Arguments are tiring. Even worse, other people often don’t cooperate with you when you’re trying to make an argument. Luckily, there’s an attractive range of weasel words available for you to just assume you’ve won the argument you never had.
‘Flawed’ is this week’s example. The Victorian Congress of Employer Associations is upset with that state’s Work-From-Home legislation. The VCEA has had an intense conversation with itself and decided that the legislation is flawed and needs to be changed to be fairer to “all Victorians” (which means employers, really). So they’ve put out a press release talking about the changes this “flawed” legislation needs. Job done!
(For more substantial reasons on why employers might not like the legislation, have a look at Guardian 2201. We think it’s flawed too, but not in the way that the VCEA has in mind.)
Concerns
One of Australian mainstream media’s favourite things is to whip up feelings on an issue, and then report on those feelings as though the media has just beamed in from Mars and discovered them.
So it is with ‘concerns.’ Voters have concerns about immigration! Pauline Hanson is tapping into those concerns. She’s also spent a long and profitable career trying to promote those concerns. True, voters do have concerns about immigration. Voters have lots of concerns the media isn’t bothering with. Voters have concerns about an ongoing Israeli genocide and climate change too but the big media companies are too busy with migration to bother with those.
Widows tax
Thank goodness! At last! The Labor government is finally doing something about the tax on widows. Crisis averted!
No, you haven’t fallen asleep and missed the nation-wide imposition of a tax on widows. What’s happened is that anti-tax media, after a lot of scrabbling around, has decided that Labor’s changes to Capital Change Tax are a tax on widows.
It would make just as much sense to call the changes “a tax on billionaires” or a “tax on cyclists”, since there are people in both groups who will have to pay a bit more tax and don’t like it. Since neither billionaires or cyclists tug at the heart strings, the conservative press and the Liberal Party have decided to go with widows.
Not all widows though, just widows who have investment properties. As far as shadow treasurer Tim Wilson is concerned, widows who are on JobSeeker and don’t have investment properties can just keep on suffering.
Terror/terrorism
The UK government has classed a protest group called ‘Palestine Action’ as terrorist, which puts them in the same basket as Al Qaeda and IS. No, Palestine Action haven’t beheaded anyone. They haven’t flown planes into buildings full of civilians either. What they have done is chuck red paint on some British planes in protest at the UK’s support of the Israeli government’s campaign of real terror, not to mention mass murder. Because of this decision, British cops are having to arrest a bunch of nuns and elderly people who’ve done nothing worse than hold up a sign reading “I support Palestine Action”.
Tightness (of the labour market)
This one is a good old fashioned euphemism, brought to you by economists and bankers. Reserve Bank of Australia head Michelle Bullock worries that now might not be the time for wage rises because of the tightness of the labour market. Tightness does sound uncomfortable, but what’s bothering the RBA is that too many people have jobs. If you’re at the RBA, you can’t just come out and say that, hence “tightness.”
Really if the unemployed are that essential to capitalism, we should start paying them properly.
