Have a good break – this time you’ve more than earned it

Looking forward to some time off over the summer holidays? I am. Long time since I’ve been in more need of a decent break. Few more columns to go, and I’m off for four weeks.

This will surprise and shock you, but regular polling by the Roy Morgan outfit has found that, by September, the total annual leave owing to Australian employees had reached a record 185 million days, up almost a quarter on a year earlier.

No need to tell you it was all the lockdowns and lockouts – not just from other countries and other states, but even 100 kms down the coast. We’ve had little ability to take leave. Nor much desire to either, if it meant holidaying at home.

The proportion of workers owed less than two weeks is down and the proportion owed more than seven weeks (including me) is up past 10 per cent. Of course, the almost 40 per cent people working as casuals don’t get annual leave.

Whether they actually get the 15 to 25 per cent pay loading they’re supposed to instead is something you wouldn’t be sure of – but we’ll leave that unpleasant thought ’til we’re back next year.

I’m a great believer in the benefits of annual leave. When I used to worry about burning out, I decided to follow two rules: always take the leave you’re given and always get a change of scenery.

Sometime back there was a fad of employers allowing people to “cash out” their leave. It was a terrible idea and fortunately seems to have died out. When, decades ago, state governments did what today would be unthinkable and simply passed a law compelling employers to provide paid annual leave, they did so for good reason.

Workers who never get a decent break in which to rest and recuperate – to re-create – do eventually burn out. At the least, the quality of their work falls off. Allowing them to use their leave money to buy a new car does both the worker and the boss an injury. It’s self-harm for capitalists.

The festive season carries risks of family fights and overindulgence as well as pleasures, but a great advantage of living Down Under is that it leads seamlessly to the summer holidays. I’ve been boning up on what advice the psychologists and others on the universities’ The Conversation website give on making sure we get the most from our holidays.

Dr Freya Higgins-Desbiolles, of the University of South Australia, offers several good tips. One is: don’t go into debt. I doubt if many people feel pressure to help the economy by spending big, setting themselves up with huge credit card bills in the new year, but if they do, they shouldn’t.

The economy exists to serve us; we don’t serve it.

Another suggestion: go back to nature. I’ve long believed that humans have an evolutionary affinity with nature – trees, greenery, water, views – which those of us who live in big cities must regularly propitiate. Go bush, do some walks. A holiday cottage backing onto a national park is perfect.

In the same vein: do simple things. In my day, parents on holiday left kids to their own devices. No one ran around spending money to keep kids entertained. Dr Monica Thielking, of Swinburne University of Technology, says “your children may complain they’re dying of boredom, but they are not. It may even be good for them”.

A growing body of research suggests boredom in children can make them more creative. Many use daydreaming to regulate boredom-induced tension. Daydreaming is good, shifting attention to thinking about “situations, memories, pictures, unresolved things, scenarios or future goals”.

Adults need to relax, de-stress, forget our jobs completely for a few weeks. But many people (including me) find this very hard, if not impossible. I like to catch up with professional reading. Many of us are still checking work emails and taking work calls.

Drs Dan Caprar, of Sydney University, and Ben Walker, of Victoria University, Wellington, say the problem for many of us is that we derive a strong sense of self from our work. “Whether we work by choice, necessity, or a bit of both, many of us find work inevitably becomes a source of our identity,” they say.

We develop professional identities (“I’m a lawyer”) organisational identities (“I’m a Google employee”) or performance-based identities (“I’m a top performer”). This can be beneficial. It’s been linked with increased motivation and work performance, and even better health, they say.

But it does prevent us from switching off. And, though I suppose I should be turning my attention to post-retirement interests, I can’t make myself read some famous person’s biography. Pop psychology is the furthest I stray from economics.

My retired mates seem heavily into streaming video, and that does tempt me – I’ll watch all the various fictional accounts of the struggles of the Murdochs – or the Windsors - and Vienna Blood on SBS On Demand even beats Vera.

Sorry. Serious suggestion: try a digital detox.

Read more >>

Orana to Christmas, summer and the chance to go bush

Out on the plains the brolgas are dancing
Lifting their feet like war horses prancing
Up to the sun the woodlarks go winging
Faint in the dawn light echoes their singing
Orana! Orana! Orana to Christmas Day

To me one of the nicest bits of Christmas is a chance to sing the Australian carols of the old ABC’s William G. James, including Carol of the Birds. Orana, by the way, means welcome.

I don’t like to boast, but one of my achievements this year was to see a brolga. Several, in fact. Flying rather than dancing but, even so, one to cross off my bucket list. I’ve also seen jabirus, magpie geese, comb-crested jacana, osprey, white-bellied sea eagles, red-tailed black cockatoos and crocodiles, fresh and salty.

I’ve also seen Timorese ponies, Asian buffalo and – more surprising – Indonesian banteng cattle. By now the banteng are endangered in Indonesia, but going strong in northern Australia.

All during a 12-day tour of Arnhem Land, bouncing along unsealed roads in a truck converted to a bus, to visit remote Aboriginal communities (complete with permits) and cave paintings. An unforgettable experience, one moneyed Baby Boomers should consider before they jet off on yet another exploration of other people’s homelands.

Actually, I sometimes wonder whether the day is coming when – because of the damage it does to the atmosphere – we will look back with amazement and envy on the relatively brief golden age when flying for tourism was not only permitted but dirt cheap, so we roamed the globe whenever we could get away.

It’s a terrible thought. Let’s hope it never happens, thanks to some technological advance in aircraft fuel. But while it lasts, let’s not forget what a privileged generation we are.

But what of ecotourism? Is it as virtuous as we wilderness wanderers like to imagine, or will the new age puritans put the kybosh on that, too?

Well, I’ve been checking what the academic experts are saying – courtesy of my second-favourite website, The Conversation – and, though you can find the killjoys if you look, I think ecotourism gets a qualified tick.

It’s true that, in an ideal world, we’d all stay at home admiring nature from afar and insisting the politicians keep the outback – and other continents’ backblocks – locked up and in pristine condition. Where damage had already been done, we’d happily pay high taxes to compensate farmers, miners and tour operators for closing their businesses, and to restore the land to its former state.

No, not going to happen. Those who live in far-flung parts aren’t going to renounce the material ambitions that drive the rest of us. They’ll continue finding ways to make a buck. If so, ecotourism – whatever its downsides – will do a lot less harm than many other ways for bushies to earn a living.

Dr Guy Castley and two other researchers at Griffith University find ecotourism can contribute to conservation or adversely affect wildlife, or both. Attitudes of local communities towards wildlife influence whether they support or oppose poaching. Income from ecotourism may be used for conservation and local community development, but not always.

But for seven of the nine threatened species they studied – the great green macaw in Costa Rica, Egyptian vultures in Spain, hoolock gibbons in India, penguins, wild dogs and cheetahs in Africa, and golden lion tamarins in Brazil – ecotourism provided net conservation gains.

This was achieved through establishing private conservation reserves, restoring habitat or by reducing habitat damage. Removing feral predators, increasing anti-poaching patrols, captive breeding and supplementary feeding also helped.

For orang-utans in Sumatra, however, small-scale ecotourism couldn’t overcome the negative effects of logging. And for New Zealand’s sea lions, ecotourism only compounded the effects of intensive fishing because it increased the number of pups dying as a result of direct disturbance at sites where the sea lions came ashore.

Michele Barnes and Sarah Sutcliffe, of James Cook University, studied the effect of a shark education and conservation tour off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii. Sharks are crucial to our marine ecosystems, yet many shark populations are in decline because of fishing (particularly for shark-fin soup), fisheries bycatch, habitat destruction, and climate change.

Sharks have a PR problem. They are feared by many, demonised by the evil media, treated as human-hunting monsters, and cast as the villains in blockbuster movies. In many places, governments cull sharks in the name of beachgoers’ safety.

The researchers found that the program gave participants significantly more knowledge of the ecological role of sharks and a more favourable attitude towards them. It also had a significantly positive effect on people’s intentions to engage in shark conservation behaviour. This remained true even after allowing for the participants’ greater initial positive attitudes towards sharks than the public generally.

Even when not off somewhere exotic, my family almost always ends up holidaying in or near some national park. But what about all the damage done to parks to accommodate the needs of tourists?

Dr Susan Moore, of Murdoch University, and others from Southern Cross University, argue sensibly that parks need visitors to get vital community and political support.

“We need people in parks because people vote and parks don’t,” they say. “Strong advocacy from park visitors for environmentally friendly experiences, like wildlife viewing, photography, hiking, swimming, canoeing and camping, can counterbalance pressures for environmentally destructive activities such as hunting and grazing.” Amen to that.

Read more >>

How business is white-anting the weekend

Whether or not they realise what they're doing, Australia's business people, economists and politicians are in the process of dismantling the weekend and phasing out public holidays. And they're doing it in the name of making us better off.

Historically, the two arrangements that have protected the weekend and public holidays from encroachment by employers are state government restrictions on trading hours and the requirement in industrial awards that employees required to work at "unsociable hours" be paid an additional penalty rate.

Charging employers a penalty was intended to discourage them from making unreasonable demands on their employees unless absolutely necessary.

The first assault on community-wide days off came in the second half of the 1980s with the deregulation of trading hours as part of micro-economic reform.

Not much later, the move to bargaining over pay rises, and then bargaining at the enterprise level, allowed employers to push for penalty rates to be abandoned in return for higher "annualised" wages.

Employers inculcated the view penalty rates were an anachronism standing in the way of progress and modernity. Many still think that way. One of the goals of John Howard's Work Choices was to make it easier - and less expensive - for employers to get rid of penalty payments.

(Another of its provisions was to make it easier for workers to "cash out" part of their annual leave - to exchange days off for money. How this squared with the original rationale for forcing employers to give their workers paid holidays was never explained.)

Julia Gillard's Fair Work changes to Work Choices represented the first setback in the push towards the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week economy. They made it harder for employers to buy out penalty payments. And the "modern award" process - which replaced the various state awards with single national awards - inevitably involved increasing some penalty rates in some states.

But now the push has resumed. Last week, the NSW government moved to join Victoria in allowing all shops - not just those in the CBD - to open on Boxing Day. Now, say the retailers, all we need is for restrictions to be lifted on Easter Sunday.

And this week, the major banks revealed their intention to push for the definition of ordinary hours in the national banking award to be extended to include Saturday afternoons and all of Sundays. The banks say they'd still pay penalty rates, but the union doubts this promise would last. It says the banks' goal is to be able to roster employees to work any five days of the week without recognising traditional work patterns.

What's the banks' justification for seeking such a change? To promote "flexible and efficient modern work practices in a way that has proper regard to the considerations of productivity and employment costs".

Ah yes. It would make the economy more flexible and efficient, and thus raise productivity. Well, in that case, say no more. Silly me.

It's not hard to see why there's been so little public questioning of this push towards a 24/7 economy. It's highly convenient to be able to shop whenever we have the time. The more two-income families we have, the more we value the ability to shop throughout the weekend.

It also fits with the trend towards leisure being commercialised - becoming something we buy (a meal out, a show) rather than something we do (kick a football in the park with our kids).

But this belief that life would be better if shops, restaurants and places of entertainment were open all hours rests on the assumption you and I won't be among those required to work unsociable hours to make it happen. An even less obvious assumption is that the push for a 24/7 economy will stop when it has captured shopping and entertainment; it won't continue and reach those of us who work in factories and offices.

As usual, the "flexibility" being sought is one-sided. Employers gain the ability to require people to work - or not work - at times that suit their firm's efforts to maximise its profits.

If those times don't fit with your family responsibilities - or just with your desire to enjoy your life (you selfish person, you) - or if the boss's requirements keep changing in unpredictable ways, that's just too bad.

It's the price to be paid for getting more prosperous (with the boss's standard of living rising quite a bit faster than yours).

But this is the part of modern life that makes no sense to me.

Accepting the economists' argument that keeping the economy running for more hours in the week is more efficient and so will raise our material standard of living, how exactly will this leave us better off?

Why does being able to buy more stuff make up for husbands and wives being able to see less of each other, having less time with the kids, having a lot more trouble getting together with your friends, and having your day off when everyone else is at school or working?

Why is this an attractive future? Why should our elected representatives reorganise our economy in ways that suit business and promote consumption, but do so at the expense of employees' private lives?

This is a classic case of business people, economists and politicians urging on us a mentality that prioritises the economic - the material - over the other dimensions of our lives. Yet again, no one pauses to ask what these "reforms" will do to our relationships.

Why is it the politicians who bang on most about the sanctity of The Family are also those most inclined to make family life more difficult?

Read more >>

Take a break and we'll all be happy

Psychologists have a form of treatment for unhappy people called PAT: pleasant activity training.

It's quite simple: you make a list of the things you like doing, then do them more often. It's not as silly as it sounds. We've learnt our brains have one system that controls wanting and one that controls liking. The wanting system tends to dominate the liking system, so we often end up doing less of what we like than we'd like to.

I suspect that's true of taking holidays. A survey conducted by Professor Barbara Pocock of the University of South Australia, as part of the Australian Work and Life Index, found 57 per cent of full-time employees would prefer an extra two weeks' paid annual leave to a pay rise of 4 per cent.

So it seems we like taking holidays (and it sounds like a good idea to me). And yet there's a wealth of evidence that many of us don't take the leave we've already got. A survey conducted regularly by Roy Morgan shows that only about 70 per cent of Australians aged 14 or older intend to take at least one holiday over the next 12 months.

Another survey conducted for Reuters by a global market research company, Ipsos, found that only 47 per cent of Australians expected to use all their annual leave. This was the lowest proportion for any country bar the Japanese, on 33 per cent. By contrast, 89 per cent of the French, 77 per cent of the Brits, 75 per cent of the Germans and even 57 per cent of the Americans expect to take all their annual leave.

Australia's governments have required employers to provide their workers with paid annual leave since 1941. In 1973 it was increased to four weeks. At the time many people thought this extravagant, but it's about average. The French get six weeks, while the Finns, Norwegians and Swedes get five.

Pocock's survey shows 60 per cent of Australian employees stockpile at least some of their annual leave. And according to calculations by Roy Morgan, the stockpile has reached 117 million days.

But if people like annual leave, why don't they take it all? According to Pocock's survey, 31 per cent of full-time employees say they're too busy at work and 13 per cent say they couldn't get time off that suited them. Nine per cent say they prefer to work.

And 41 per cent say they're saving their leave for a future holiday - though I'm not sure I believe it. If it were true - if people were merely delaying their holiday-taking - unused leave wouldn't have piled up the way it has.

It may be that some young people want to combine a few years' leave for an extended overseas trip, but I think "saving for later" is just something you say when you don't get around to taking it all.

I guess it's true that, consciously or unconsciously, some employers don't encourage their workers to take their leave, especially key employees.

But is all this a problem? Why turn unused leave into another crisis? Well, a lot of employers think it is a problem, including one quite close to me. If an employee takes all her leave during the year, the business suffers an expense of 52 weeks' wages on her behalf. But if she works all year without taking leave, the expense rises to 56 weeks' wages, with the extra four weeks of untaken leave owing to her adding to the firm's liabilities. (What's more, the firm doesn't get a tax deduction until the leave's actually taken.)

In theory, insisting that everyone take their leave during the year means the firm has to employ more people. In practice, it means we all have to work a bit harder when we're not on leave to cover for those of us who are. Whistle-blowing economists call this "work intensification" - but it comes from employer penny-pinching, not from the leave itself.

Another group that sees untaken leave as a great problem is Tourism Australia, the federal government's tourism marketing body. Last year the minister, Mar'n Fer'son, launched a campaign called No Leave No Life to encourage us to take our leave and spend it in Australia, complete with commercial TV show.

Tourism Australia can think of many reasons why it's good to take your leave (and for employers to offer a "leave-friendly workplace"). Achieving work-life balance, we're told, comes with improved physical and mental well-being.

Taking your leave helps you avoid the stress of exhaustion and burnout. You get greater job satisfaction when you approach your task in a refreshed state. Taking leave helps you "rediscover your friends, your family and most importantly yourself".

The figures show we're taking more, shorter breaks rather than blowing the lot in one go. Maybe this explains why we have trouble making sure we've taken it all. There's some evidence that taking more short breaks is more re-creational (though I like to make sure of it by taking short breaks through the year and a big break at the end of it). Tourism Australia says there are so many great experiences to be had we should "take the opportunity to visit some more of Australia and gain some lasting memories as well as some great stories to share with others".

It may be advertising copy, but it does have evidence behind it. Psychologists have shown that one reason we get more satisfaction from buying experiences rather than things is the memories and stories we're left with.

Recent research also shows that much of the pleasure we gain from holidays is in thinking about them before we take them. But please don't think that's what I've been doing in this column. And if you're working through, please don't think I'm trying to make you guilty or envious. But I'm off.

Read more >>