Tim Blair
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 06:49am
Rethinking my Twitter hatred. Turns out that those little messages pay off:
Julia Gillard and other federal MPs have secured a massive 32 per cent pay rise – and apparently Facebook and Twitter are to blame …
John Conde, the Remuneration Tribunal head and a long-standing advocate of higher wages for federal MPs, said the pay rise reflected the more onerous responsibilities faced by the nation’s 226 elected representatives in today’s 24/7 landscape.
“Email, Facebook, Twitter and the like have increased community expectations on members as regards their availability to their constituents,” the tribunal said.
This explains why Joe Hildebrand just bought a Bentley (used, as if it makes a difference). The canny columnist is obviously on a parliamentary-equivalence pay deal.
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph ... _allowance
What other undesirable outcomes can we expect to see arising from a cabinet of ministers sitting around twittering their thumbs and facebooking all day, if doing so takes so much time out of their day that the Remuneration tribunal deem their usage worthy of a 32% pay rise?
No wonder the countries stuffed, when they spend 32% of their working hours promoting themselves on social networking sites, next they will be on compo for RSI.
Shouldn't they be doing this in their own time?
What would it cost to employ a social-media PR consultant to take care of their twitter and Facebook identities for them?
Certainly not the 32% pay increase that's for sure.
I actually assumed that they already paid someone to maintain their SN sites for them...well, apparently not it seems.
Time politicians started behaving like politicians again, this and got back to the nitty gritty of actually running the country properly, not in between posting on Facebook or Twitter.
Has our addiction for social media sites gone too far?
Now we are justifying 32% pay increases with them?
Tony Abbott hardly uses his, I think this is a good sign, at least one of them has better things to do than Tweet or Facebook all day.
