Female tradies want their OWN range of hi-vis workwear - saying being 'forced' to wear men's clothes is DANGEROUS

Quick! Call the feminists.  Men and women are the same!

Female tradeswomen say the male-oriented clothing used on work sites is not only ill-fitting but could put them in danger.

Research from Bisley Workwear has found nine out of ten tradeswomen have struggled to find protective workwear which fits properly.

Major issues include loose clothing snagging on ladders and frustrations around trying to remove a pair of overalls from inside a portaloo.  

Of the women surveyed, a third felt they couldn't work as hard in poorly-fitting uniforms.

Nearly half of all workers resorted to wearing their own casual clothing to worksites rather than proper workwear.

Former Block contestent Kara Demmich told the Today Show when she first showed up she was excited by the clothing options but soon encountered problems.

'I was given a bag of clothes and I thought we had hit the jackpot with free clothes but they didn't fit me. They were a bit big and when you're on a work site and climbing over joists you want something that fits and is not going to get caught,' she said.

Female landscaper Coralie Stuart said the lifespan of clothing had also been an issue for her.

'If you have to climb a ladder and if you're not wearing gear that fits properly it's dangerous,' she said.

'And the clothing I was wearing through it in the space of a couple of months and the menswear doesn't fit. So it's good to have something that is fitted to my body not going to get caught on anything and tear things.'

The research also found about 45 per cent of women surveyed felt self-conscious wearing uniforms which weren't designed for the female body. 

The rising number of women working in trades and research around workwear has prompted changes to the uniforms.

New gear has been created that is more form fitting with a feminine design twist to eliminate the risks associated with women wearing men's workwear.

The managing director of Bisley, David Gazal told the Australian that women's clothing is traditionally adapted from men's with very few changes.

'So we then got a men's silhouette and a men's garment and we put in nips and tucks and called it a women's style. It still didn't fit but we called it a ladies style.'

But he said the company's new female workwear was designed for women from the ground up.

'When we put this range together, we put it together knowing that the garment needs a completely different silhouette, and completely different fabric,' Mr Gazal said.

'Fabric needs stretch, it needs wearability, and functionality in the workplace. It needs to be durable and not be restrictive.'

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Bandt has Labor in awkward corner

Would Richard Marles welcome a New Australian coal-fired power station? The ABC’s David Speers asked the question of Labor’s deputy leader at least a dozen times last week before giving up and answering himself.

“So that’s a maybe?” he suggested. Marles voiced no dissent.

The place called “maybe” is dangerous terrain for an opposition, particularly on an issue on which passions run high. Just ask Jeremy Corbyn whose maybe/maybe not policy on leaving the EU is the principal reason the British Labour Party is looking for a new leader.

It is a while until our next federal election but we can already predict that climate policy will be one of Labor’s principal sources of grief, just as it has been at every election since 2010, when Julia Gillard received a mandate not to ­introduce the carbon tax she promptly did.

In last year’s election campaign, inviting Bill Shorten to share the costings on his 45 per cent emissions target was the surest way to make him lose his rag. His unsteady performance on the issue was one reason voters considered him shifty or worse.

His climate platform has been repudiated by his successor, leaving a great dollop of jelly where Labor’s policy ought to be.

Today Labor faces its own divisions while the Coalition, at least around the cabinet table, is united on climate and energy, probably for the first time since John Howard was in government.

Labor has spawned a ginger group that brands itself the friends of coal. They meet at Otis (the restaurant, not the elevator) in an ­attempt to move Labor back to the sensible centre.

That is the point on the spectrum where every Labor politician who aspires to win the next election wants to be, armed with a policy that unites the Collinsville miners and the knitting nannas of Marrickville in one happy family.

A cool, damp summer might have given Labor some breathing space. Instead, the climate debate has been charged with a new ferocity. Anthony Albanese is being challenged from within his party to hitch his wagon to the climate emergency.

He has wisely resisted, knowing that the moral argument is not one Labor can easily win.

Labor’s discomfort

Adam Bandt’s elevation as the Greens leader has increased Labor’s discomfort. Bandt is taking the Greens further towards the extreme as he shapes a clearer divide between the parties of the left.

“Ultimately Labor’s got to ­decide where it stands,” Bandt told Michelle Grattan recently. “If Labor thinks it can continue to walk both sides of the fence, they’re going to stay in opposition for a very long time. The script that we saw playing out at the last election will just play itself out at the next election.”

Last week, after the existence of the Otis Group was revealed by the media, Albanese retreated further into maybe land. His claim that the party “is united in our position that climate change is real, that we need to act on lowering our emissions” these days counts as a motherhood statement. It puts him on a unity ticket with both the Coalition and the Greens while being slightly less convincing than either.

His rhetoric on coal, that it will continue to play a part in Australia’s economy for decades to come, is almost identical to Tony ­Abbott’s, as Bandt delights in pointing out. Brand differentiation is all but impossible.

The Coalition is offering Labor few favours by charting a steadier course on energy policy.

Malcolm Turnbull’s departure relieved much of the tension in the Liberals’ partyroom, while Scott Morrison’s anointing of Angus Taylor as the minister for bringing down ­energy prices gave a practical sense of direction to the policy challenge that has been lacking for more than decade.

A vocal group in the partyroom wishes the Prime Minister was driven less by the Paris target. Another vocal section urges him to do more. Yet the party has seldom been more comfortable in its own skin on climate policy, having re­framed the question in economic rather than scientific terms.

Crucially, the energy policy challenge has evolved in the past three years since the closure of coal-fired power stations in South Australia and Victoria brought home the vulnerabilities of wind and solar.

The gap in the market is now supply that backs up renewables, rather than baseload, reducing the reliance on coal and putting the focus on the supply of gas. Labor shows no signs of coming to terms with this development.

The government is at last starting to parade its achievements, dispelling the myth that it has been sitting on its hands.

Labor had expected to contain emissions at 635 million tonnes by now by imposing a carbon tax. The Coali­tion has managed to reduce emissions to 532 million tonnes without one. Wholesale electricity prices are down 35 per cent year on year. The retail price has fallen for four consecutive quarters. The carbon footprint of the average Australian is well on its way to being half as big as it was in 2005.

It makes it almost impossible for Labor to take a position sufficiently different from the Coali­tion to make a fight of it. Entering a bidding war with the Greens, as it tried to do last time, would put blue-collar seats in danger.

It is little wonder that a growing group in Labor is urging Albanese to sue for peace by adopting policies close to those of the ­government and seeking a bipartisan solution.

A couple of years ago the Coali­tion would have jumped at the chance to neutralise climate as an election issue. Its elevation as a party-political issue in the first place puts Australia at odds with most other Western democracies.

Right now, however, there is little enthusiasm in the Coalition for extending an olive branch. Much better to watch the opposition squirm.

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Qld Labor MP condemns Jackie Trad, Premier Palaszczuk ahead of caucus meeting

Trad is a Lebanese wheeler-dealer

Queensland’s longest-serving Labor MP and former Police Minister Jo-Ann Miller has unloaded on Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Deputy Premier Jackie Trad, accusing them of ostracising her, saying “Trad is a four-letter word”.

Labor MPs are due to meet this afternoon for a caucus meeting where they’ve been encouraged to share any concerns they have about Ms Trad’s leadership and role in cabinet, amid backbench angst that her ongoing presence is dragging down the government’s popularity.

In a radio interview this morning, Bundamba MP Ms Miller – who has been in Queensland parliament for 20 years – said Ms Palaszczuk had not spoken to her on the phone since she was forced to quit cabinet as Police Minister in 2015.

“Certainly I believe the Labor Party has ostracised me because I had the temerity, so to speak, to do this (raise corruption concerns about Ipswich City Council),” Ms Miller told ABC Radio Brisbane, in an interview recorded a week ago.

“In the Labor Party there appears to be a view that it’s OK to call out corruption and misconduct with the LNP, or the Tories, but it’s not OK to call it out if it’s on your own side.

“Labor people should be better than that, and it’s up to Labor people to always call out corruption, misconduct, bad behaviour, on their own side, because that’s expected of us.”

Asked by interviewer Rebecca Levingston whether Ms Trad had “damaged Annastacia Palaszczuk’s chances of a third-term in parliament,” Ms Miller answered: “Well, Trad is a four-letter word, isn’t it? Maybe I should leave it at that.”

Ms Miller said she did not have much of a relationship with Ms Palaszczuk since she left cabinet.

“Well, she doesn’t speak to me very often,” Ms Miller said. “I think that when she made it very clear that I had to go as Police Minister, after raising these issues of corruption, I think there was an expectation, certainly I was told to leave the parliament, as well.”

“So that morning I was told to get out, I was told to get out of not only being the Police Minister, but also of the parliament, but I refused to get out of the parliament.”

Before her resignation, parliament’s ethics committee found Ms Miller had demonstrated a pattern of reckless conduct which did not meet ministerial or parliamentary standards, relating to her disposal of confidential documents.

Trad responds

Outside this afternoon’s left faction meeting, Ms Trad was asked to respond to Ms Miller’s comments, that her surname was a “four-letter word”.

“Can I say that I think Queenslanders are sick of politicians talking about politicians? I think they want us to be focused on making sure they have the jobs, the roads, the hospitals, and the schools for their children, and that’s what I’m focused on, putting this budget together.”

Labor’s factions are meeting this afternoon, ahead of the caucus meeting. Both sets of meetings are typical for a Monday afternoon ahead of a parliamentary sitting.

‘Go and have a cold shower’

Ms Palaszczuk has warned disaffected Labor MPs to stop focusing on Deputy Premier Jackie Trad’s job and focus on their own futures, ahead of a crucial caucus meeting.

Ms Palaszczuk said if MPs had concerns to raise, they should do it in this afternoon’s caucus meeting, but said she was certain Ms Trad would remain Deputy Premier at the end of it.

“Look, as I said on Friday and I’ll say it again, caucus is the place where MPs can raise any issues they have. I expect it to be a very calm meeting today … (Ms Trad) will be Deputy Premier (at the end of it),” Ms Palaszczuk said.

“I think everyone should go and have a cold shower, it’s pretty hot out there.”

Of backbencher Jo-Ann Miller’s comment in a radio interview, broadcast on Monday morning, that “Trad is a four-letter word,” Ms Palaszczuk said MPs should have higher standards of behaviour.

“I don’t think MPs should be speaking about other MPs like that … (Ms Miller) is just over there,” she said. “I think people should have a higher standard of behaviour and everyone should be respectful to each other.”

She said she still said “hello” to Ms Miller at events, and her office was in contact with the rebel backbencher during the last sitting of parliament.

But she said Ms Miller had disappointed Labor MPs when she was photographed hugging Pauline Hanson during the last state election campaign.

“I think a lot of people were very disappointed when Jo-Ann went and embraced Pauline Hanson during the last state campaign, and I was disappointed in that as well,” Ms Palaszczuk said.

Ms Palaszczuk said she would not be distracted by the backbencher angst over Ms Trad’s political future. “I will not be distracted by it, and I’ll give a very blunt message to everybody today: get focused on your job and not worrying about everyone else’s jobs,” she said.

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Joaquin, Osher, Greta and Jane show ignorance can be blissfully rewarding

First they came for the coal, then they wanted our milk. While the demonisation of coal ignores how this mineral has probably done more for human prosperity and progress than any other, we at least can comprehend why climate activists have turned on coal — even if their plans are reckless and impractical.

Extinction Rebellion protesters are so committed to shutting down the coal industry that they lie on polystyrene foam mats made from fossil fuels while they use acrylic resins made from fossil fuels to super-glue themselves to the road with chains and pipes manufactured with coal-fired energy. Soon they’ll be doing the same in dairies.

Because now the woke are turning on milk. They want to make us guilty for feeding milk to our kids.

“We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, even though her cries of ­anguish are unmistakeable,” Holly­wood actor Joaquin Phoenix said accepting his Oscar on Monday. “Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.” Perhaps he was trying to distract from how he makes millions eliciting cries of anguish from filmgoers as he glorifies a fictional serial killer.

While Scott Morrison is pilloried for waving a lump of coal around in parliament, heaven help the next leader caught supping on a glass of pasteurised full-cream. Apparently we are heartless, arrogant bigots against other species, we are speciesists who steal milk from cows, and we need to be told.

Remember when fashionable political stances could be summarised as a resistance to instruction, a push for freedom? There was a libertarian approach, embraced especially by the young and focused on the rights of individuals — they railed against young men being conscripted to serve in Vietnam, disrupted social norms and demanded equal rights for women and indigenous Australians.

Activists defied and challenged edicts handed down by moralising church leaders, conservative institutions or paternalistic governments. There was a healthy disdain for anyone telling others how to live their lives.

But now the fashion goes with the zeitgeist, advocates for groupthink and shames individuals into conforming. Now the woke are the preachy ones.

Who are we to decide how to run our lives when there are Hollywood A-listers prepared to set an example by wearing the same designer tuxedo to more than one awards dinner? Why should we enjoy breakfast when an actor equates the rights of people, countries, races and genders with the rights of individual ­species?

“We’re talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender, one species, has the right to dominate, use and control another with impunity,” said Phoenix. Presumably he will boycott next year’s Academy Awards because in all their history they have not so much as nominated a single other species; it’s been a Homo sapiens clean sweep.

And once Phoenix succeeds in his equal pay battle for the full cast of Doctor Dolittle, perhaps he could head to the Serengeti to campaign against lions imposing their will on wildebeest, a clear-cut case of speciesist exploitation if ever I saw one.

“We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources,” the actor said. “We fear the idea of personal change because we think we need to sacrifice something, to give something up.”

He ought to know. After all, the poor bloke was wearing the same suit he had worn a week or so ­earlier. Jane Fonda too made a virtue of wearing a dress she had worn six years earlier. As if that weren’t hardship enough, after she was glammed up by her spartan team of just three stylists (hair, dress and make-up), Fonda posted on social media that she was wearing ­“Pomellato jewellery because it only uses respon­sible, ethically harvested gold and sus­tainable ­diamonds”.

Ah, sustainable diamonds, the thinking woman’s carbon sink. Mother Teresa has nothing on these people. This year’s Nobel Peace Prize will be hard to pick.

We get much of the same closer to home, of course. On the ABC’s Q&A this week, one of their panellists was reality television host Osher Gunsberg (he fronts The Bachelor) who was chosen, wouldn’t you know, because he proselytises for climate action and claims to practise what he ­preaches.

“I wouldn’t call it sacrifice at all,” Gunsberg said of his vegan, non-internal combustion and ­carbon-conscious lifestyle. “The benefits that I get in my life for the choices that I make around my impact on the world are extraordinary … I’ve been driving electric cars since 2011, and they’re an extraordinarily exciting … they’re really fun to drive. I have an electric bike as well, a moped that I get around on. It’s super fun.”

This is nirvana, all the fun of the carnival and saving the planet at the same time. I don’t know Gunsberg’s travel habits so can’t say whether he is a globetrotting climate hypocrite like Prince Harry, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore and so many others, but I did find some articles featuring him with his pet dog — now this is a carbon extravagance. Studies show pet dogs can have the annual carbon footprint of a car, so surely any climate radical with a pet is a fraud.

Naturally enough I reckon Gunsberg is free to live his life as he likes, and back any cause he chooses. But it is the preaching that grates, and exposes him, along with the way the media (in this case the ABC) then presents him as an authority.

He suggested to the Q&A audience that Australia’s export coal market would soon collapse, which is just not true.

International Energy Agency figures show our coal exports have reached record levels and are set to plateau or ­increase slightly into the future.

Just in our two largest markets there are more than 100 new coal-fired power stations under construction in China and more than a dozen in Japan. I look forward to The Bachelor episode where they explain how these generators will function without coal.

Preaching is everywhere. This week Greta Thunberg admonished the entire global population when she tweeted about record carbon dioxide levels and said, “no one understands the full meaning” because this is the “crisis that’s never been treated as a crisis”.

The 17-year-old, who has yet to finish her schooling, also tweeted that “Indigenous rights = climate justice”.

Then, right on cue, the BBC announced it would be producing a TV science series with Thunberg. Again, this teenager should feel free to spruik her views wherever she likes but the worry is how her silly hectoring is ­embraced and amplified by adults, politicians and public broadcasters. It will be amusing when she loses one sandal and they all adopt that as a sign.

Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy, admonished the nation for xenophobia and racism this week, referencing unspecified incidents directed against Chinese-Australians, apparently triggered by coronavirus panic. When I pressed for details Murphy referred to incidents “reflected widely on social media” and noted that “individual in­stances have not been recorded”.

Labor MP Andrew Giles called for a national anti-racism campaign suggesting the coronavirus was being used as an “excuse” for racism. Just like those who created an “I’ll ride with you” campaign based on a fabricated incident after the Lindt cafe siege, Giles was quick to think the worst of mainstream Australians — he wanted a publicly funded national lecturing campaign.

Like brainwashed cult members, the new woke left loves to receive instructions and be lectured. And, in turn, it likes to lecture us.

Fortunately, mainstream people in a host of Western democracies who are sick of sanctimony on climate change, energy, border protection, Brexit and, yes, even veganism have been able to express their will through the ballot box. Just because the so-called elites are enraptured by the sound of their own exhortations, it doesn’t mean they’re resonating.

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 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here