Auspundits

McKew & Annual Leave

Maxine McKew was well known for her Friday night stints at the ABC's Lateline program, filling in for Tony Jones. Well, it should be no surprise then that she does not understand the leave options of most employers. Grant Harris, reader and contributor of Auspundits, has mailed this in:

She's opened her mouth and removed all doubt that the dumb look may have been unintentional.

She wants to give workers the ability to buy additional annual leave to help them with looking after kids on school holidays.

We have a system already that does that its called Leave Without Pay or LWOP and has been appearing on workers' pay slips for years.

Think about it. The only way you cld buy additional leave is if you use your savings. So you buy leave and what do you get in return? An additional period of paid holidays. Set aside how you might go about pricing the present cost of that income stream and you have 2 options.

Use your savings to live off for a while so that you can spend additional time with the kids or;

Use your savings to give back to your employer so that they can return it to you in the form of paid leave so that you can spend some additional time with your kids.

Secondly, Maxime seems to be all in favour of leave-deficient workers getting access to holidays in return for cash but surely the flip side of that is cash deficient workers getting access to dollars in return for giving up holidays. But when workers were allowed to do this under Work Choices the likes of Maxine cried fowl from the rafters.

Taking A Break

Been rather hectic around here lately. Will get back to blogging when I've had a chance to recover. In the meantime, two articles on two dimensions of Britain's demographic crisis:

1. Thousands of missing teenagers: Britain Getting Concerned About Forced Marriages
2. Marriage hits lowest rate since records began almost 150 years ago

The Economics Of Modern Day Fertility Rates - Part Two

By Grant Harris* presents the final part of his thesis that modern day fertility rates are the "consequences of adopting at the policy advice level and implementing at an institutional/government level radical New Left philosophies borne out of the protest movements of the 60s generation." Part 1 can be found here.

Carnage Jihadi Wrought: In Images

"A body lies on the floor behind a glass door stained with blood and marked with bullet holes inside a Jewish religious school after a shooting attack in Jerusalem":

"Palestinian guerrillas celebrate in Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp near the port city of Sidon in south Lebanon". WTF? Guerillas? These guys look like ordinary people off the street supporting jihadi violence:

Now these guys look like guerillas...I mean jihadis...but they are called "supporters": "Palestinian Hamas supporters celebrate after a Palestinian gunman opened fire in a Jewish religious school in Jerusalem, in Jabalya camp, northern Gaza Strip":

The Economics of Modern Day Fertility Rates

By Grant Harris*

I will seek to demonstrate that declines in fertility rates in Western civilisation over the last three to four decades can be directly attributed to the economic consequences of adopting at the policy advice level and implementing at an institutional/government level radical New Left philosophies borne out of the protest movements of the 60s generation.