Last weekend Kim Beazley was wallowing like a pleisosaur in a shrinking pond. He announced that he would return Australia to the 1950s. He would abolish all Australian Workplace Agreements and return industrial relations to collective bargaining.
So it is not only John Howard and the conservatives who want to return Australia to the 1950s. Labor has joined the fray. Both sides of politics – insofar as there are “sides” any more – have now picked out awful elements of 1950s Australia and said this is the way forward.
Of all the things for Beazley to differentiate himself with Howard on he chose perhaps the worst – industrial relations. Yet he has gone to jelly on so many other issues, especially refugees and civil rights in the war on terror.
It seems Beazley has joined the politics of fear. He is playing on the fears of workers. And he is responding to his own fears from union heavies and their supporters in the caucus who would tip Beazley out unless he vowed to restore union power.
He has saved his own neck, but only as leader of the Labor Party. He has got a blip in the polls, but it is not an election winner for several reasons.
There is a greater fear than that of having your boss exploit you: having no job at all. On that score the Government is doing very well.
Secondly, the sky is not falling in with Australian Workplace Agreements. Sure, we have one of two examples of exploitative boss stripping away penalty rates for little in return. And we have enough data for both sides to argue that people are better or worse off under the new system. But overall, as Paul Keating once said, “The dogs bark and the caravan moves on.”
It is only during a change that voters get volatile. As more people go on to workplace agreements they will cease to make comparisons between awards and workplace agreements and concentrate on comparing this week’s pay with a hoped-for pay rise next week.
The old standard of having each and every worker being better off will become irrelevant. The question will be whether the bulk of people are better off.
Thirdly, since Howard has taken the “battlers” from Labor. In fact they are not “battlers”, but aspirational voters. They are the very people who like workplace agreements. They are happy to cash in. They want flexibility. They do not want to be dictated to by a union official.
Herein lies an instructive difference between the way Beazley has looked after his mates in the union movement and the way Howard has looked after his mates in the big end of town.
Both have to look after their mates because that is where the critical money is coming from. Without union donations, Labor would be in a bad way. Without business donations the Liberals would be in a bad way. The only thing left to prop them up would be the $17 million to $18 million that they each get in taxpayers’ money under electoral funding legislation. Business and union funds are the competitive edge.
Howard looks after the big end of town with subsidies, easier media-ownership laws and in the last Budget a lower top marginal rate and tax reductions on superannuation.
In doing so he cleverly did not alienate the aspirational workers. The cut in the top marginal rate was small and absorbable. The slashing of superannuation tax did not offend them because they thought there was benefit in it for them when in fact most would not have their super taxed anyway. Only people with several hundred thousand in super would get a benefit.
So Howard’s looking after the big end of town has come at little or no electoral cost.
But Beazley’s looking after union mates will be costly indeed. He has alienated business which will be more vociferous in its anti-Labor commentary in the lead up to the election.
Moreover, he is appeasing a shrinking support base. The percentage of unionists in the workforce has been constantly shrinking for decades. It was 26 per cent of the workforce in 2000 down to 22.4 per cent last year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
His pledge to replace Australian Workplace Agreements with the old class system of workers vs capital only makes sense as a mechanism to shore up his own leadership among a few powerful people.
Union officials like a centralised system with complex awards because it keeps them in a cosy job. But it is grossly inefficient and depresses wages overall.
We may be lucky. Like the GST, the new system might be too difficult to unwind if Labor wins the next election due at the end of next year.
What is to happen to more than half a million workplace agreements already in force? By the end of next year maybe as many as two million workers will be on workplace agreements, many of them getting more pay than available under awards.
Another reason Beazley may not be able to honor his pledge is that it is unlikely he will have a majority in the Senate, even if he wins the election.
Beazley should have opted for improving the system rather than scrapping it. The Senate Estimates hearing earlier this month revealed a lot of weaknesses in the system of ensuring employees have informed consent to workplace agreements. An unchecked employer declaration appears to be enough.
As it is he has alienated business without attracting many new votes because those who are suspicious of Howard’s new industrial-relations system would vote Labor anyway.