There’s a great opinion piece (from Lenore Taylor) in the AFR this weekend about the school vouchers that were snuck into the budget this year. Briefly, $475 million has been budgeted to provide $700 tutoring vouchers to the parents of children who fail national reading and maths tests. The articleContinue Reading
There was the regularly quarterly article today, following the release of the latest labour force statistics, about how women earn less than men, with the gap narrowing very slightly in the last quarter. Varying reasons were given (Joe Hockey, for the government, drawing a long bow and claiming work choicesContinue Reading
Corporate Woman in the AFR this week had a disappointed commentary on the Federal Budget. The column was calling for a bit more compulsion from the government around flexible working hours – pointing out that business needs to become more friendly towards women/carers who are working, rather than government using the taxContinue Reading
I was sitting in a meeting today, when we were talking about the need for an impressive barrister to help us with a tricky regulatory issue. Our solicitor talked about one potential candidate, “he’s got the right amount of grey hair”. It reminded me of when I was consulting. PuttingContinue Reading
In writing my last post, I also found a couple of fascinating bits of research that have been made possible by HILDA – the Household Income Labour and Dynamics longitudinal survey which has been collecting data since 2001. Glass Ceiling or Sticky Floor? – this is a fascinating piece of researchContinue Reading
There have been two major policy pieces about work and life in Australia recently. Each one recommending some change, but not especially effectively, judging by the results so far. It’s about Time – a project by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) examining the interactions between family responsibilitiesContinue Reading
There was a fairly impassioned article in the SMH today about how the Australian health care system has very definitely become a two-tier health care system. “the wealthy and privately insured get timely health care and the rest, unless they are critically ill, can wait.” Except, as I blogged recently,Continue Reading
I know it is April 2 now, but as a holder of a New Zealand passport, I still had to link to this fantastic explanation of how the sheep population of NZ is causing global warming. And a bonus link – climatologists secure funding to breed glaciers in captivity. It’s goodContinue Reading
Since Wednesday, Chatterboy has been in Royal North Shore Hospital being treated for pneumonia. On Friday, when he’d turned the corner, the doctors admitted to us that they had been quite worried about him on Thursday, when nothing seemed to be working, and he was lying there, listlessly, on oxygen,Continue Reading
Today’s book review is The Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson. Bill Bryson is one of my absolute favourite authors, mainly driven by two quite different books: Neither Here nor There (a story of backpacking around Europe) and Mother Tongue, which is his history of the English language. So I hadContinue Reading