Entitlement Mentality: a personal perspective
Joe Hockey in a press conference on the ground at Telstra Dome, Melbourne (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
All forms of media has been nothing short of drowning in Joe Hockey’s suggestion that Australia has an entitlement mentality which needs to be cut back. I am only going to link to one article, for the benefit of our many overseas readers, because this is my personal perspective. I am not entering into the argument of is Joe Hockey right or wrong.
Citizens of many other countries would be astounded at the level of benefits we enjoy in Australia. My husband often shakes his head and says “This would never happen in Nigeria”. No, it wouldn’t, but the whole economy is different, as are the economies of many other countries. For example, you don’t have to be rich to have house maids in Nigeria. We certainly can’t afford one in Australia (not yet anyway). Back in the ’80s, I could afford a housekeeper once a week. I was talking to someone from Vietnam today and he said the same thing about Vietnam – everyone has house maids. Except the house maids, I assume!
In Australia we get 20 days paid annual leave a year, most people get 10 days paid sick leave a year. After 10 or 15 years service with one employer (depending on industry) there is 3 months paid long service leave. We have about 12 paid public holidays a year. We have compulsory superannuation, currently 9% of pre-tax wages/salary paid by the employer. Over the years this has become included in the calculation of total remuneration.
When I arrived in Australia in 1974 there was no such thing as the baby bonus ($5,000 from September 1) or the first home owner’s grant (currently $7,000). There was child endowment, but it wasn’t much.
Back in 1980, sending a child to a government school did not cost an arm and a leg as it does now. Health insurance was a lot cheaper. Interest rates were a lot lower too.
Dear Max Tomlinson
Recently I blasted the Governor of Wisconsin for his weird attitude to women, never dreaming a man in Australia could top it. Well, bloody hell, Max Tomlinson managed to leave me fearing for the future of equality of women yet again. I thought I’d drop Max a little note, but as I don’t have his email, I’ll just publish it here.
Dear Max,
I read an absolutely astonishing report in the Brisbane Times today. Actually, I read it on-line, but I am not sure you know the internet actually exists yet. Oh, we know you can use email because apparently you did. The article was titled “LNP staffer quits after anti-feminist rant”: personally, I think the editor made a mistake. It was, in my view, the rant of a misogynist. But what would I know? I am, after all, only a woman.
I was horrified to read your personal beliefs. There are those that bleat about multiculturalism in this country, often deriding muslims for “their treatment of women”, yet here you are rabbiting on as if Dr Who delivered you to us from about the 1600s in the Tardis.
Let us look at some of your email in a factual light, shall we?
“like most women, you probably don’t possess the necessary drive, determination and decisiveness that men innately possess.”
That will be why more women than men are graduating from our universities, because women lack the drive, determination and decisiveness, I suppose?
Australia is ranked sixth in the world, with 56 per cent of women completing a degree, compared to 41 per cent of men. The OCED on average produces more female graduates than male, with 46 per cent of women and 31 per cent of men completing a degree across their lifetime. Only Japan and Turkey reverse this trend by producing significantly more male graduates than female.
Maybe it was just your generation, Max, back in the 1600s. You think?
“Blokes dominate most areas of human endeavour because nature equipped them with something called testosterone.”
Equal Pay for women at risk?
Equal pay for women just took a beating in some backwoods state of the USA on March 31, 2012 in a very quiet way. My apologies to followers of ours who live in Wisconsin (I know there are a few) but for goodness sake, how the hell did this happen? I don’t often stray from the primary focus of this site and even less often comment on happenings in the USA, however I smell danger here for woman in any western society if this is not stopped and stopped now. I am a woman and I have three daughters, several nieces, two grand-nieces and a sister. I care what happens.
When I was alerted to this today I thought it had to be a somewhat belated April Fool’s Day joke, but it seems not. There is a word in the Great Seal to the right: Forward. Really? Seems not.
On Thursday, with little fanfare, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker signed a bill repealing the state’s 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act, which allowed victims of workplace discrimination to seek damages in state courts. In doing so, he demonstrated that our political battles over women’s rights aren’t just about sex and reproduction—they extend to every aspect of women’s lives.
Now, I’m no American constitutional lawyer, but I had to ask is it only women at risk here, or does the 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act cover other groups as well?
The Equal Pay law wasn’t just about women—it also offered protection from discrimination based on race, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and other factors. But it was enacted largely in response to a large gap between men and women’s compensation, one that was worse than average in Wisconsin—in 2009 the state ranked 36th in the country in terms of workplace gender parity.
Equality does not mean sameness
On my recent article Bullying isn’t cool, Nancy of Spirit Lights The Way commented:
When we accept ourselves “as is,” we are more able to shrug off the irrelevant opinions of others.
Instead of poisoning ourselves by internalizing the hate, ignorance, and fear demonstrated by the bullies of life (who are trying to make themselves “bigger” by making us appear ”smaller”), we embrace our individuality.
When we have the courage to swim against the stream of outdated societal expectations and values (whatever they are), we become strong and resilient. We learn to survive and thrive, instead of tossing in the towel or cashing in our chips when others disagree with our lifestyle, our choices, or our unique point of view.
Nancy is right. It just isn’t that easy for all people to achieve, so we need to practice.
Many groups have strived and still strive for equality over the years. Women, black people, gay people and disabled people as primary examples. I remember back when women were fighting for equal pay for equal work (the fight isn’t over): many women were burning bras and tossing out the heels and the makeup. I refused. Yes, I expect to be treated equally, but that doesn’t mean I want to BE a man. I like my nail polish and my heels, thank you very much. I’ll accept the nail polish may not be so good if I wanted to be a plumber or a mechanic, but I’m not either. I don’t want to have to adopt mannish traits simply to be entitled to vote or earn equal pay. Mind you, don’t call me “love” in a professional environment. 😆
I once worked for a gay manager. In those days, to avoid discrimination, he behaved perfectly straight. Was he comfortable doing so? I don’t know: my guess is, not so much.
K for Koala
Choosing a topic for the K instalment of Our A – Z of Australia was easy. Koala. Oh, all right, I could have gone for Kangaroo. That just seemed a little too easy. Besides, I wrote about kangaroo when we had a lovely dinner.
Smellavision
My mother chose to have her photo taken at Sydney Zoo with a snake draped around her shoulders rather than a koala. She always told me it was because she knew the koalas were a bit scared. My mother looked rather scared of the snake.
J for Jellyfish
We all like jelly, right? At least when we were kids. Oh, for American readers, jelly is not jam to us, although I understand it is to you. Jelly for us is a dessert, usually served with ice-cream, especially after you’ve had your tonsils removed.
Jellyfish are amazingly beautiful creatures. Translucent and in some cases colourful, gliding gracefully through the water. Some are also deadly.
Their venom is considered to be among the most deadly in the world, containing toxins that attack the heart, nervous system, and skin cells. It is so overpoweringly painful, human victims have been known to go into shock and drown or die of heart failure before even reaching shore. Survivors can experience considerable pain for weeks and often have significant scarring where the tentacles made contact.
Read More: http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/box-jellyfish/
I once worked for a lovely woman who insisted on doing a lot of ocean swimming. Every year there is a Rottnest Channel Swim and Ms X loves to enter. One year she came back with some very nasty injuries from jellyfish invading her wetsuit. The wounds took forever to heal.
While various species of jellyfish are found around the world, many of them harmless, the box jellyfish are specific to the costal areas of the northern regions of Australia and the Indo-Pacific. Continue Reading »
Shoot me now, I have an iPad and I like it
Image via CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase
As detailed on our “About” page, I am both an accountant and an information technology professional. Many years ago, before I was qualified in either profession, I worked for a company that had a funny little Mac thing. I hated it. I guess that is where my aversion to Apple products started. Back then Apple products weren’t very willing to hold hands with that other lot, the Windows based systems. I don’t remember much about that machine other than it was little and and I didn’t like it.
Fast forward many years and my daughter and her husband (good grief – that is about 20-something years later) had a house full of Apple products and have owned every iPhone release. My son-in-law actually worked supporting iPhones talking to Exchange server, or something equally mysterious! Still I refused to be tainted by the dreaded Apple for a phone. For a start the damn thing didn’t have FM radio and couldn’t multi-task. Both features were show-stoppers for me. Plus all music had to be iTunes format. I didn’t want two music libraries on my PC. So I stuck with my trusty Nokias. I LOVED my Nokia N97.
I for Immigration
Given immigration looms so large in our extended family, I felt this was an appropriate topic for the “I” article of Our A – Z of Australia. The results of the 2011 Census are not yet available, sadly, so I am depending on the 2006 Census data for this look at Australia.
Michel Lawrence spent two years photographing as many people as possible from every different country of the world who now calls Australia home. The result is a celebration of our multicultural diversity. Enjoy!
The statistics from 2006 tell us that 22.2% of the population were born overseas. Add to that the 20% of Australian’s who have at least one parent born overseas. Of the remaining 58% a lot would have overseas-born grandparents. This percentage has dropped: in 2001 the percentage of overseas-born was 28.2%. This is a nation of migrants. Australia has been since Europeans arrived. Australia’s First People have been here over 60,000 years, Europeans arrived to stay in only 1788.
H for Health, Home and Happiness
Queensland Flooding
I had been struggling to find a suitable “H” topic for Our A – Z of Australia. Mr O has a friend who lives in the USA and is here for a short visit to his wife’s parents. As Mr O starts work on Monday, about the only opportunity he had to enjoy a catchup with his friend was yesterday. I suggested that rather than drive after a social get-together, Mr O stay the night and come home this morning.
I got several text messages during the evening, one of them saying “There is no place like home. I miss my wife and kids.” He hasn’t even read The Wizard of Oz.
There is the personal perspective: we are now all together and yes, we could do with a bigger home, but we have a home and we are all happy. Yes, my family do miss their relatives back home and yes we are pondering my current medical journey: even so we are happy and we are home.
Random Observations of Life 