Has Bill Shorten ever been an employer, payed payroll tax, work cover, superannuation, has he payed out on sick leave and long service leave liabilities, suffered a down turn and had to survive, been sued for unfair dismissal, carried customer debt, had to actually sell anything????? I don't think so!

Clear to see now why our IR Laws have moved so extremely the other way under this Govt. Maybe a big scare campaign advertising 'blitz' by the Employer Groups to scare the heck out of voters at the next Federal Election like "Bills Boys" did to Howard.
I agree with Patick's comment. Never had to run a business in their lives half of them. I wonder if Bill Shorten contemplates how business owners lay awake at night wondering whether their business will survive for another 3 or so months coz things are so tough ??
Nah ! Look at the real world please, not the rarified atmosphere of Parliament House.

Off-shoring definitely damages your business brand. How many people hate Telstra and having to talk to someone in a call centre in India prentending to have a different accent?
It's reasonable to expect to be able to talk to a local representative of the company you are dealing with.

Why is Bill blaming HR for the off-shoring of Australian jobs, when it's purely a financial decision that's responsible! God save all the clerical and customer service employees in Australia. Maybe we can become the new mining generation?

Offshoring is a complex issue re Australian jobs. If you take Dicks Smith’s view of the world, which I do, there are 7 billion people on this earth not just 23 million Australians. Money going offshore may or may not cost Australian jobs but it also lifts people overseas out of poverty. An Australian may have to go without a new plasma TV but and citizen of Pakistan may be able to pay for medical treatment they could not otherwise have afforded. There is close to 50% youth unemployment in Spain. As an ex employer in Western Australia I learnt all about the work ethic of some Gen Y’s. I doubt that kind of attitude is overly present among Spain’s disenfranchised unemployed. What is wrong with offering Spanish youth a chance of work in life? It is just plain wrong to think about someone who does not live in Australia as being less a person than us. Charity may start at home but Australian’s waste billions of dollars every year on premium pet food, TV’s, new cars, electrical gismo’s and so on. The world is flat and if we are going to have a future wealth needs to be spread around. Finally, offshoring is not charity – it is about people with less money than us working hard for a living. They are not asking for something for nothing, they just want to work!

Robert Lopez

www.expertsoftwaresystems.com.au