Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

Up the workers, Howard style

Given that Howard and his ministers are, for the first time, unwilling to guarantee that no one will be worse off, one can only assume that the results will be little short of catastrophic for a large proportion of the workforce.

It is a great relief to return to Australia and find the Labor Party speaking with one voice, even if all it is saying is will Mark Latham please go away. Actually that's not quite fair; Labor is also fairly unanimous about the need to oppose John Howard's industrial relations legislation.

This is indeed a subject on which all sections of the party can agree: left and right, workers and aspirationals, traditionalists and trendies. The difficulty for the beleaguered parliamentary party is that the running is being made not by the movement's political wing, but by its industrial base. It's not that Kim Beazley isn't trying; for once there is genuine passion in his condemnation of a government which, in the past, he has frequently allowed to get away with murder (in the case of asylum seekers, almost literally).

But his best efforts are being drowned out by the pre-emptive strike launched by the ACTU and its battle-hardened secretary Greg Combet.

Combet's attack and the modest advertising campaign that has accompanied it are not only spot on (claims by Howard and others that they are misleading are themselves lies) but have been devastatingly effective. Perhaps for the first time, the battlers who have naively believed that a conservative government could be trusted to look after their interests are having serious doubts.

Howard has been forced to take personal control of the struggle for hearts and minds (not that he was reluctant - the destruction of organised labour has been an obsession since his schooldays) and release his own advertising under the benign headline: MORE JOBS, HIGHER WAGES, A STRONGER ECONOMY.

Well, up to a point. Given that Howard and his ministers are, for the first time, unwilling to guarantee that no one will be worse off, one can only assume that the results will be little short of catastrophic for a large proportion of the workforce.

Howard's assertion that his plan is simply evolutionary, a natural progression from what has gone before, is equally absurd. If the destruction of the Industrial Relations Commission, a fundamental of Australian society since Federation, and its replacement with an employer puppet preposterously called the Fair Go Commission (shades of 1984) is not a radical change, then Howard is a genuine liberal and I am a Dutchman.

It is worth noting, incidentally, that the government advertising campaign is yet another gross misuse of taxpayers' money; the legislation for Howard's revolution is not even drafted, let alone enacted by Parliament. The so-called 'factual information' (shortly to be enhanced by a wildly emotional electronic campaign) is not about informing the public of changes to their entitlements and obligations, but about softening them up for the assault, when it finally comes. However, Howard set the precedent with his GST campaign many years ago, and he's not about to embrace more honourable standards now.

Given the public resources at his disposal, he will probably win the initial publicity battles and even when the changes become law many employers may hang back from exploiting the draconian new powers at their disposal, at least in a period of high employment and severe skill shortages; at first the victims will be confined to the weakest and least articulate. But as time goes on increasing numbers will find that they are in fact losers, and that they have been conned yet again by Honest John.

They will be at least tempted to turn back to Labor. Beazley and his colleagues may finally have an opportunity to persuade them to do so.

In the meantime, Labor is once again being urged to abandon its traditional ideal of a fairer and more equal society ('the politics of envy', as those seeking to safeguard their own positions of privilege describe it) and to pay more attention to the travails of the top end of town, as if the Libs weren't already doing that job with a single minded tenacity.

A Mr D Webber of the highly predatory Macquarie Bank recently bemoaned his plight: 'I live in a $2 million house, but there is not much else,' he snivelled. 'While I am on a big income, my lifestyle soaks that up.' Oh, the tragedy of it. It was reminiscent of a letter writer to the Sydney Morning Herald last year who explained patiently to the readers that there was a good reason that the rich needed more money than the poor: it was because they had higher expenses.

While one expects this nonsense from the self-interested, it is alarming to find it within the Labor Party itself. Craig Emerson, a former front-bencher who should know better, stated last week that someone earning $100,000 a year in Sydney was not rich.

Twaddle, Mr Emerson. Rich and poor are comparative terms, and those with incomes within the top five percent of the population are by definition rich. The fact that they want to become richer is a matter of greed, not of economics.

And dear old George W Bush, still defiantly refusing to set greenhouse gas emission targets, has his own solution to global warming: soon, he told a breathless media, we would all be driving hydrogen powered cars. The last political loony to espouse this idea was the late and unlamented Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who also believed in miracle cures for cancer.

Sure, hydrogen powered cars (if they eventually become practical and widespread) would help, but they hardly constitute a coherent, long-term policy. That, of course, is far too hard for a man too lazy to learn to pronounce the word nuclear.