The Book of Job Excerpt II

'My goodness, it's almost as insubstantial as the real thing!'

Tuesday, 1 June 1999

A Beazley classic in Caucus today. He was waffling on about the sins of the Government's GST package and how there was ample room for the ALP to fix it up. Then Sid Sidebottom, a well intentioned but naive fellow, jumped up and asked, 'How? How are we going to fix it up Kim?' As Gareth would say, it was like farting in church. Beazley stuttered and spluttered for a while before finally replying, 'We don't want to give out too much detail just yet'.
Translation, he has no idea.

At Flinders Street station, where the march ended, federal ALP leader Kim Beazley offered a “rolled gold guarantee” that Labor would oppose the new laws in the parliament, “side by side with the union movement”. But he stopped short of any promise to roll the laws back if elected to government.

He made carefully and vaguely worded promises that a federal ALP government would “not allow any individual contract to undermine any employment conditions” and would “guarantee a fair umpire”, but didn’t promise to abolish AWAs as former leader Mark Latham had.

Beazley said that an ALP government would have an “independent determination of the minimum wage” and “ensure that all Australians feel secure and not at risk of unfair dismissal”. “We will never surrender. We will fight this from Broome to Brisbane”, he assured.

Green Left Weekly, June 30 2005

Not an awful lot's changed over 6 years it seems.