OPINION
Look at them: look at them and laugh. Big businesses thought that nauseating virtue-signalling over an endless parade of Current Things would make the left like them. Now they’ve got a socialist left government in power and they’re quickly learning just how recklessly stupid they’ve really been. The left may be the parties of the wealthy, university-educated elite, but that doesn’t mean they’ve thrown off the brainwashing of twenty years of Long March indoctrination at school and university.
Australian PM Anthony Albanese was a hardcore communist in his university days and after speaking at Australian Communist Party forums, doing interviews with the Party’s official newspaper, and leading Labor’s hard-left faction (derided even within the ALP as “the Bolsheviks”). Does anyone really think he’s just shucked all that aside?
The Top End of Town clearly did — now, they’re learning the hard way.
As the second wave of the government’s industrial relations legislation, the dishonestly named Closing Loopholes Bill, lands on them, the full enormity of their folly must be hitting big business like a hammer blow.
The Australian
Far from its election campaign promise of “moderate changes”, Labor is dancing firmly to the crack of its masters, the union movement.
Take a helicopter view of the Albanese government’s industrial relations changes and it is undeniable they represent a decisive move away from the Coalition’s relentless anti-union approach towards the interests of workers and unions […]
Andrew Stewart, one of the nation’s leading experts on workplace law, says Labor’s agenda has swung the policy pendulum. “I think when you total up all the changes there is a really significant recalibration going on and, yes, it’s in favour of employees and unions,” Stewart tells Inquirer.
The Australian
One of the biggest gifts to unions is a “power of one”, whereby unions will be able to intervene in workplaces where there is even a single union member employee.
Professor Stewart – one of the nation’s top workplace law experts – said the rights for delegates were not “just about servicing your actual members, it’s about servicing potential members”.
“It means you might have a workplace where there are one or two union members but they now formally have the right to advocate on behalf of everyone in the workplace who is eligible to be a union member and the employer will have to give them reasonable facilities to do that,” Professor Stewart said on Wednesday […]
The Closing Loopholes bill says a delegate is entitled to represent the interests of union members and “any other persons eligible to be such members”, and have reasonable communication with them.
Delegates must be given reasonable access to the workplace and workplace facilities as well as reasonable access to paid training during work hours unless the employer is a small business.
Australian Resources and Energy Employer Association chief executive Steve Knott said the changes would “make certain employees, who are first and foremost members of the workforce, de facto union organisers paid for by the business”.
“This would apply to all businesses, including those with no union presence and no enterprise agreements,” Mr Knott said.
“The motivation is clearly not to increase productivity, but to insert a union presence into every workplace in Australia. The end game is to drive increased union membership which in turn lifts political donations to the ALP.”
The Australian
The Labor government is made up almost entirely of university hard-leftists and union hacks — including Industrial Relations minister Tony Burke, a career union official — and it shows.
And it’s going to cost us all, big time.
Labor’s IR changes will cost employers up to $9bn in extra wages over the next decade, according to new government estimates, as business vows to oppose what it claims are extreme and interventionist workplace reforms
Detailed Department of Employment and Workplace Relations costings – tabled along with the Closing Loopholes bill on Monday – said the labour-hire changes could cost employers up to $510m annually assuming just 66,446 labour-hire employees would be covered by new Fair Work Commission orders.
The department also estimated the cost of minimum pay standards for digital platform workers would be $4bn over the next decade.
It said the businesses would likely be able to pass on the extra costs “through higher prices for consumers or third-party businesses”.
That means ordinary Australians are going to pay for Labor’s indebtedness to the union movement, and the virtue-signalling stupidity of big business.
It also means the opposition leader Peter Dutton has a tremendous opportunity to win back the Coalition’s traditional core: middle Australia and small business.
While the Coalition will always, and must always, vigorously support small business and entrepreneurs, it owes absolutely nothing to big business.
Big business has ignored, even mocked, social policies favoured by Coalition voters such as religious freedoms and opposition to the voice, and makes a virtue of not donating a red cent to the Coalition without an equal and opposite donation to the ALP.
So just as unions extract a huge policy quid pro quo for every dollar they give the ALP, the Opposition Leader should be telling big business unless there is a historic realignment of interests, they can forget about being rescued from Tony Burke’s IR reforms next time the Liberals are in office.
The Australian
Dutton should look to Florida as an example. When Disney used its behemoth corporate power to meddle in the Parental Rights in Education Act, Governor Ron DeSantis responded by stripping Disney of its cosy tax concessions. The corporate giant can gibber and rage all it likes, but DeSantis was elected by voters — Disney wasn’t.
Every giant corporation, from Wesfarmers to the AFL, that’s using its wealth and power to interfere in similarly contested issues, from gay marriage to the Voice referendum, ought to be reminded of that fact.
Otherwise, as Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker might say: You get what you fucking deserve.
