Deal Brokers

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday July 30, 2005

Nick O'Malley

It has been a first-round battering for the Government in its industrial relations fight. It wasn't even inthe ring throwing punches, writes Nick O'Malley.

IT HASN'T been a good month for the Workplace Relations Minister, Kevin Andrews, nor for the Federal Government's plan to remake Australia's workplace relations system.

Things started to go awry at the end of June, when state Liberals snubbed the Prime Minister, John Howard, by noisily supporting states' rights at the party's federal council meeting. The party's Queensland leader, Lawrence Springborg, called the Government's plan to take over the states' industrial relations systems "absolutely stupid".

Then the National Council of Churches declared "the value of each worker is not as a commodity, but as a person, a human being, loved by God", and called on the Government to "slow down and step back from its apparent haste".

The next week the unions launched their campaign against the changes. The hundreds of thousands of workers who took to the streets around the country didn't bother the Government, but the union advertising campaign that followed did.

A week later opinion polls found Howard's approval rating had slumped by 10 per cent. Then employer groups, the Government's staunch allies on industrial relations, began to get edgy. Mark Bethwaite, Australian Business Limited's chief executive, blamed the ACTU's success on an information "vacuum" created by the Government.

Heads rolled in Andrews's office, with former Peter Reith staffer Ian Hanke taking over responsibility for selling the reforms to the media. A public relations consultant and former Howard adviser, Graeme Morris, was called in, and a backbench taskforce, headed by former Liberal federal director Andrew Robb, was set up.

Andrews disappeared into the shadows to concentrate on finalising the complex legislation. The unions chalked this up as another minor victory.

Things got really interesting this week when it was revealed that the Treasurer, Peter Costello, would be "very open" to extending the abolition of unfair dismissal laws for workers in companies of fewer than 100 staff to the entire workforce sometime in the future. Presumably when he becomes prime minister.

Not only was this a tremendous free kick to the unions and Labor, it cemented opposition to elements of the Government's package from two senators critical to the Government, the Queensland Nationals' Barnaby Joyce, and the Victorian Family First senator, Steve Fielding.

Without the support of one or the other of these two, the Government will not be able to get its legislation through Parliament.

Greg Combet, the ACTU secretary, says its stand against elements of the Government's plans was a turning point in the campaign.

The two senators have spoken out against parts of the Government plan that would dump guaranteed public holidays and lunch breaks and extend the abolition of unfair dismissal.

"They're singing from the same song book," Combet says. "They have clearly been talking to each other and that is the first time that has happened on a specific issue." Fielding denies the suggestion flatly, saying his opposition to elements of the plan are all his own.

On these issues at least, it appears the Government is going to have to come to the bargaining table. The ACTU will now work to have more issues brought to that table.

While the senators questioning the Government's plans might be unrelated to the unions or the Labor Party, it is the unions that are raising the concerns, and thereby attracting the senators' attention.

The unions will try to broaden the breach, drawing the public's attention to other rights workers could lose under the Government's plan to cut the number of guaranteed working conditions from 16 to five.

Over the coming weeks expect to see fire and noise over the possible loss of redundancy pay, overtime loadings and allowances. In light of the recent success of the campaign against the changes, senior Labor and union figures believe the Government will be willing to horse trade on some of these issues.

So far the Government is holding firm, with Robb and a spokesman for Andrews claiming there are no plans to give any ground. And as the Democrats senator Andrew Murray points out, none of the internal dissent the Government is facing goes to the heart of its reforms.

Some Coalition senators, staunch states' rights defenders, are concerned about the creation of the single federal industrial relations system over the states' systems. Fielding is primarily concerned with defending holidays for families.

None of them has raised an eyebrow at Howard's primary goals of filleting the Industrial Relations Commission and transferring its power to set wages to a new body, the Fair Pay Commission, or of replacing the 16 allowable matters with five rights enshrined in law. They are cherry-picking their objections.

This, says Murray, is why the Government has been slow to defend its proposals. Among the key Senate votes, there is no opposition to the core of the plan.

"You look back at the [GST] tax reforms. They had modelling and documents and tables and graphs, the whole thing was very well argued," he says.

"Look at this. All you have is a six-page statement from the Prime Minister and the odd minister getting up occasionally."

Murray, whose vote could become crucial to the Government if it fails to get support from Joyce or Fielding, has no objection to a unitary industrial relations system, but is firmly against the stripping of power from the commission and the scrapping of allowable matters.

He reckons Howard is gambling that most workers won't have felt the effect of the changes until the months after the next election.

"The Government doesn't feel it has to justify its case," he said.

According to Morris, who is helping craft the reformist message, the Government will hit back; it just got its timing wrong.

He agrees that the unions have won the first round, if only because they were prepared to tackle the issue as soon as the Government announced what it was planning.

The Government had planned a massive campaign in support of the proposed changes when the industrial relations legislation starts to reach Parliament next month.

"The ACTU jumped early and did their job, but this is not the type of campaign that is just going to run for a couple of weeks," he said.

Combet agrees, pointing outthat the ACTU is budgeting for a two-year fight. "Our finishing line is not when this legislation goes through Parliament," he said."The next election is far more significant than that."