Andrew Barr’s a lucky guy. With a safe legislative assembly seat and a double income, no kids lifestyle one imagines he’s got a lot of options about how he spends his time and money.
But for those of us either supporting kids, or single, (or both) and earning much less than a ministerial salary life is a little scarier.
Which is why he comes across as a little detached in his latest media release calling on us all to stop hoarding our annual leave and take a holiday to help out the struggling hoteliers of the tourism industry.
- New research shows Australians have accrued 123 million days of annual leave.
The amount of leave accrued has grown 11 per cent since December 2006 with one in four full time employees having 25 days or more of annual leave they could take.
This is not healthy. It’s widely recognised that holidays are important in managing stress, high levels of which can cause serious health problems for individuals and damage the economy by reducing the overall productivity of the Australian workforce.
You want to talk about stress? Stress is living from paycheck to paycheck without knowing that at least if the work disappears you’ve got a month’s leave accrued to pay the bills until you can get some other kind of work.
It’d be nice if we all had major investment portfolios to draw down on, and owned our own houses outright. It’d also be nice if it rained lollipops this afternoon.
But heck, let’s not assume people are hoarding leave just because they’re silly.
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