Senator Andrew Bartlett
Friday, August 05, 2005
 
Workplace Relations – even more of your money to be spent selling you stuff that’s bad for you

I’ve complained before about the Government’s theft of up to $20 million of public money to pay for advertising of their workplace relations policies. Today there is news that “taxpayers may be slugged up to $100 million for an advertising blitz to sell them the Howard Government's dramatic rewrite of industrial relations laws.”

If there’s one thing worse than being subjected to ideologically extreme, socially destructive and economically dubious legislation, it's having to pay for the advertising that tries to con you into believing it’s actually good for you!

What makes me even more frustrated – if that’s possible – is that I believe it is desirable to have a single national workplace relations system, but this chance is being lost because of the ideological obsessions of the Liberal Party. Have a look at this piece if you want more detail on my views about this. However, in short any national system needs to be a fair and balanced one. Instead, what John Howard is trying to do is push through the full range of extreme proposals that the Democrats prevented going through the Senate for the last decade, plus some extra ideologically driven ideas that are so out there, they didn't dare put them forward before.

Also, in the absence of cooperation from the states, the federal government will have to rely on the corporations power under the Constitution to widen the scope of national laws. This will still leave a residual of 15-20 per cent of workers outside the national system, which means even the extreme and unbalanced system the government is proposing will lose a lot of the possible efficiency gains of a single national system. In addition, there is genuine legal uncertainty about whether such legislation would be constitutionally valid, which will leave business and workers in an uncertain position while the issue is fought out in the High Court, as it almost inevitably would be.

I notice that the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) has called on the “Commonwealth, State and Territory Workplace Relations Ministers (who are meeting today) to give in-principle support to the goal of a national industrial relations system and to set up a joint intergovernmental taskforce to examine options to achieve it.” This is a nice idea, and there is no doubt that by far the best approach in moving to a national system would be through negotiating an agreed position with the states, who could surrender their industrial relations powers to the Commonwealth (as Victoria has already done) if they agreed with the structure of the new national system.

However, I don't see ACCI as having much credibility in calling for such a cooperative approach, given they have been the chief public cheerleader for John Howard’s extremist workplace relations jihad. It’s a bit rich calling for cooperation from the States when you’ve been egging on the federal government in pushing the most ideologically extreme and deliberately antagonistic assault on employee rights in a century.

Having said that, if Mr Howard was genuine in wanting the efficiencies of a fair and balanced national workplace relations system, he would drop his aggressive assault on existing protections and instead approach the states about developing an agreed position. The chances are probably less than zero that he will, but he’d certainly have my support in the Senate if he did.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Friday, August 05, 2005 Permalink
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