OhBehave and TheNightOwl, RTFP! (- ‘P’ for ‘post’). MTOW is disputing the ‘kickback’ comment, just as you are. OhBehave, how in the hell did you come up with calling MTOW ‘paranoid’ when he was agreeing with you? I think you’re so dug in to ‘your trench’ that you’re just assuming any post from ‘the other side’ must be hostile and therefore you MUST disagree with it.
MTOW offers his opinion, (he even calls it that) that the Australian Media were partisan in their reporting during the Dispute. You may disagree with that, (how, is beyond me, but I accept that you too are entitled to your opinion). Having lived through it, I also believe that the Media slanted their news heavily to the Companies’ point of view. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Ansett, owned a large slice of the Australian print media, while the ABC was then (and still are?) staffed almost entirely by the Bob Hawke Adoration and Glee Club, so that shouldn’t come as any surprise.
If you accept that, even without the ‘tall poppy syndrome’ lurking just below the surface in many Australians, is it any wonder that the Australian public, 99.9% of whom gleaned virtually everything they knew about the Dispute from the Media, were so virulently against the pilots? Besides, they were being inconvenienced and someone had to be to blame – who else but the driver who was refusing to drive as the obviously totally guilty party?
For anyone not aware of the Australian ‘tall poppy syndrome’, ask yourself how many times you’ve been in a bar, party or at some friend’s place for dinner and some bloke you’ve just met learns you’re an airline pilot. In Australia at least, in two out of three vases, he’s likely to say something along the lines of “Oh yeah, I was thinkin’ of beein’ a pilot when I was a kid, (but [unstated], I became a bank teller / insurance salesman / builder’s labourer instead).” – the heavy inference being, he could have been a pilot if he’d really wanted to, it would have been ‘no sweat at all’, and you’re now doin’ the ‘piss-easy’ job he would now love to be doing, (but with none of the work, time or expense involved in achieving it), “rootin’ all them hosties, only goin’ to work once a week, stayin’ in all them five star hotels, getting’ all them free trips overseas, and makin’ stacks and stacks of dough for doin’ nuthin’ [“Yuh don’t even do anythin’ anymore, do yer? It’s all done by computers, innit.”].”)
The Companies and their propaganda machines (both paid and unpaid) very effectively exploited that streak of envy not far beneath the surface in many Australians. How many times did we see the term ‘fat cats’ applied to the pilots? And how quickly some of us saw attitudes change in so-called friends and neighbours when they “learned all about “the strike’ ” from the drivel turned out on the television.