$30,000

Ken L at Surfdom has an interesting post about DEWR, “The Workchoices Department”, being fined this week for breaking its own laws. “Back in 2005,” says Ken, “unions organised a national day of protest against WorkChoices and many public servants wanted to attend … DEWR issued a memo to all government departments which was interpreted as an instruction not to grant leave for this purpose. The [tag]Public Sector Union[/tag] took action against DEWR in the Federal Court alleging that this refusal to grant leave was made for a reason prohibited under the Act: namely, that the workers concerned were members of a union.”

The decision by the [tag]Federal Court[/tag] concluded amongst other things that there was

an awareness at the time … that it would have been wrong to issue advice that leave should not be granted to a Commonwealth [tag]employee[/tag] if the leave was sought for the purpose of attending the [tag]Day of Protest[/tag].

Says Ken,

Suspicious people of course will suggest that this was not a case of innocent misunderstanding, and that in fact DEWR deliberately issued an instruction that was known to be incorrect. Needless to say it would be hard to prove such an allegation and anyone who made the claim would expose themselves to the risk of [tag]defamation[/tag] proceedings.

Might we mention that back in the day, the [tag]Minister[/tag] was Kevin Andrews and his Deputy Secretary Workforce Participation at the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) was one Bob Correll, who “oversighted the development and implementation of the outsourced public employment services in Australia, called Job Network”?

Andrews is now the notoriously inept Minister for Immigration and Citizenship and Bob Correll, our own very special penfriend, is now Deputy Secretary of the Department, responsible for [tag]Borders[/tag], [tag]Compliance[/tag], [tag]Detention[/tag] and [tag]Technology[/tag]. A reasonable person might infer that, given Kevi’s obvious [tag]intellectual[/tag] limitations, Bob is the “brains”—for want of a better word—behind Kevin Andrews. Perhaps in the way that [tag]Dick Cheney[/tag] is the “brains” of [tag]George Bush[/tag]. So cosy. Ah, the [tag]Howard[/tag] government’s senior [tag]public service[/tag] [tag]culture[/tag]! Don’t you just love that culture? Don’t you just love the small of [tag]brimstone[/tag] in the morning?

[tags]Ken L, Ken Lovell, Kevin Andrews, Bob Correll, DEWR, Immigration, Citizenship, Employment, Workplace Relations, Workchoices, penfriend, pen-friend, politics and government, politics, government, election, Australian, Australia, values[/tags]