The saga over the Government’s attempt to deal with the loss-making Australian National Line is a vignette of the wider sorry picture of industrial life in Australia. The Government had planned to sell ANL to the British-based shipping company P&O, but announced last week that it would retain it in public ownership until it had been restructured and turned into a viable commercial enterprise.
The decision will temporarily head off strife with the waterfront unions, the main stumbling block to a sale. The unions had threatened strikes unless it got guarantees on Australian crews, jobs and conditions.
Treasurer Ralph Willis says it is difficult to sell a enterprise that is making losses and has high debt. Wrong. Such enterprises can be sold if the buyer sees potential in them. But there will never be potential in ANL or any Australian-based shipping line while the mill-stone of expensive, inefficient, unjustifiable union-enforced work practices remain.
The unions have priced ANL out of the market. It is only a gutless Government subservient to the unions that uses taxpayers’ money to delay the inevitable commercial consequences of the unions’ actions … that they price themselves out of jobs as well.
The greater scandal is that the Government has paid huge sums to Labor-friendly consultants over the past 18 months to disguise the obvious … that ANL would be a goer without the union conditions and is not a goes with them.