Senator Andrew Bartlett
Friday, July 01, 2005
 
Industrial Relations - the Last Great Divide
Today sees the Government formally take control of the Senate. Today and yesterday have also seen hundreds of thousands of people protesting at the federal government’s proposals to drastically amend Australia’s workplace relations laws – proposals that would have no chance of succeeding were it not for the occurrence of the first thing I mentioned. The area of workplace relations policy has been one I have found immensely frustrating over the past 8 years I have been in the Senate. It is the one remaining area where most of the old divides between Labor and the Conservative parties remain. For this reason, it tends to provide more opportunity for real conflict and fireworks, which will always be what most of the media focus on, rather than the merits of various proposals. For the same reason, it was also the legislative area where the Democrats were most often in a balance of power position.

One of my biggest frustrations (and there were a lot) from the last election campaign was that efforts to draw attention to the major consequences for workplace relations laws if the Senate balance of power changed were ignored by the media, who just stuck to highlighting the Labor vs Liberal divide on this matter, even though that was not the central factor that had influenced outcomes in this area for over a decade.

When a Government puts forward draconian proposals, it tends to immediately turn the political 'debate' into one where battle lines are drawn and accusations and invective are lobbed across the trench separating the two sides. This almost inevitably means (a) the details and merits of various proposed changes are ignored, and (b) there will be a (political) winner take all result.

In a democracy, a winner take all result often means an ideologically or politically driven goal will triumph over a outcome that is driven by practicality. It also almost always means there is a group of losers – not so much political losers (there will always be some of those) - but people who lose out and are worse off.

The Prime Minister's old pledge that 'no worker will be worse off' clearly cannot be met under the proposed changes as they stand, confining that phrase to the PM's long line of broken promises and pledges, some of which he must have known were untrue even as he was making them. But this is still a good general measuring stick to use to assess the merits of the changes, and there is no doubt that the changes as they stand will make many workers worse off. It should also be acknowledged (and often isn't) that they will almost certainly make some other workers better off. I could accept this if those whose lot was improving were those currently at the bottom of the pile and vice versa, but I fear that the reverse will be the case. This will mean greater inequality of rights, opportunity and income between different groups of people in our country. That will be a sad result and also one that is very difficult to reverse.

Despite the black & white, 'battle lines drawn' portrayal of this issue, there are aspects of the debate from all sides which have merits. For example, moving towards a single, national system of industrial relations is one that I (and the Democrats as a party) have long supported. However, we also strongly oppose some of the things that the Howard Government wants to make part of that national system. For some weird reason, some press gallery journos perceive this as just an individual view of the Democrats' Senator Andrew Murray, rather than a consistently held and advocated policy position of the Democrats as a whole. Steve Lewis from The Australian did this again just last week, portraying Andrew Murray as someone the Government might be able to individually negotiate with on this issue, rather than the reality which is that all Democrat Senators hold the same view. His latest media release, presenting the view of all Democrat Senators, not just his own, can be found here. As he states in that, “apart from a shift to a single national IR system, the Democrats are opposed to the radical ideological reforms proposed by the Government. A unitary system will bring efficiency and costs savings, most of the other proposed reforms go too far and will excessively tip the balance of workplace relations to favour employers, leaving many workers vulnerable.”

It is not widely known that the Democrats came very close to reaching agreement with the Government during the last Parliament on legislation providing a national system to cover unfair dismissals. Whilst the Government was willing to not include their long-held obsession with giving employees in small business fewer rights against unfair dismissal than those in larger businesses, they wouldn’t agree to our ‘no worker worse off’ test which we wanted before we would agree to such a shift. Of course now the Democrats' direct influence in the Senate is reduced, the Government can pass a system which is as ideologically extreme as they wish.

Because the Government's proposed system won’t have the cooperation of the states, it will have to rely on the Corporations power under the Constitution. This also means it won’t have universal coverage, so there will continue to be anomalies, which is unhelpful to business, unions and employees alike.There are reports that some West Australian Liberal Senators (as well as Qld National Barnaby Joyce) are uneasy about supporting the Government’s legislation on state’s rights grounds. This raises the outside possibility that a different path with a far better policy outcome is still possible, at least in some areas, if only people could be persuaded to step back from their political battelines. No Democrat will support laws which give fewer rights to employees purely on the basis of how large the business they work for is. However, all Democrat Senators have consistently supported moving towards a single national workplace relations regime, as long as that regime is balanced and provides sufficient protections for employers and employees.

A cooperatively negotiated outcome with the State Governments where they agree to surrender their industrial relations powers (as Victoria quite successfully already did some time ago) to a national system, that is fair and balanced would be the best result for everybody. The Democrats would support the necessary legislation in the Senate, even if a few 'states righters' from the Coalition wouldn't. This would need to have guarantees built in so the Government couldn't just change it all a year later to reflect their ideological obsessions, but I'm sure this could be done.

I know there are a number of business leaders who feel this would be a better outcome which would provide more balance, less conflict and greater uniformity. However none of them seem willing to publicly ‘break ranks’ on this issue either. It is a pity that it doesn’t seem possible for a few business leaders and a few state governments to break the polarised dynamic on this issue, as there is much more common ground and shared interest than is generally acknowledged.

The chance for a better economic, social and legislative outcome is there in theory, but the constraints of so many years of ideological and political polarisation make it very unlikely that it will happen.

PS: For a fuller outline of the Democrats’ position on all aspects of this issue, go to this site. Robert Corr comes unashamedly from a Labor perspective, but still provides useful summaries of some aspects of the campaign.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Friday, July 01, 2005 Permalink
|


<< Home