Lessons the nuns taught me

I remember as a primary school student being encouraged by the nuns to open a diary at the beginning of Lent each year and to record in its pages all the occasions on which I denied myself something that normally I would have relished (principally chocolates) and all the occasions on which I went the extra mile in my devotional life (such as paying a visit to church on a Saturday afternoon, saying additional prayers at night, or yawning through an extra decade of the rosary) in order to prepare myself for Easter. The more work and self-denial of this kind you put into this preparation, we were told, the greater will be your reward in heaven.

Yeah, right.

Like the rest of my classmates, though, I knew there were more tangible rewards to be had: during Holy Week, the diaries would be handed in to the nuns and those kids deemed to have enjoyed themselves the least were rewarded the most (again typically with chocolates or a half-day’s head-start on the Easter holiday break). Of course, the kids in my class who normally never saw chocolates or who were too busy with household chores on Saturday afternoons to visit a church (and there were quite a few of each) were at a disadvantage in this arrangement. But no-one seemed to mind. I can’t help thinking that the reason may have been that the nuns were wise and kindly enough to factor this kind of disadvantage into their rewards scheme.

I don’t have the same confidence in the Federal Government’s industrial relations legislation. I do not find convincing its multimillion-dollar advertising campaign promoting the legislation (shades of the rewards in heaven argument for Lenten sacrifices) and I find disconcerting its almost mocking dismissal of the concerns raised by Church, union and community leaders about the impact of the changes on those workers who have the least strength with which to bargain under the proposed new arrangements let alone the unemployed (a case, in other words, of bugger those who have no chocolates to forgo!). More than anything, though, I am disturbed by a question posed by Bruce Duncan in this week’s News Backgrounder piece for Online Catholics:  

“Why is this legislation being forced through at such speed,” writes Duncan, “as if Australia was in the middle of an industrial crisis, when we all know this has been a time of unprecedented industrial harmony, after years of steady economic expansion, high company profits and, in relation to wages, historic proportions of profits?”

To my mind the Government simply refuses to answer this question. Perhaps it is because there is no answer to it. We are simply meant to take it on trust, like the Government’s account of the ‘Children Overboard’ affair, or the weapons of mass destruction that were said to justify an urgent invasion of Iraq, or the need for urgent new anti-terrorism legislation as though Australia is somehow at the epicenter of the so-called international war on terrorism.

Yeah, right.