The Union Ticket to the Public Purse
Week of 5 June: the carve-out buried in a workplace bill, the quiet death of the 82% promise, and Labor's own premiers turning on the budget
Deep in the Fair Work Act sits section 354, a provision with one small job. Nobody gets to punish or favour a business over whether it has signed an enterprise agreement.
A workplace bill landed in parliament this week dressed up as housekeeping, and it starts cutting a hole in that protection.
The week runs from that carve-out and what walks through it, to the quiet death of the 82% renewables promise, to a federal budget so on the nose that Labor’s own premiers are piling on. Then, the hardest question of the lot, whether anyone is actually fit to replace this mob.
Bluff and bluster in politics is nothing new. We marvel at the masters and their capacity to spin their way out of one crisis and sometimes into the next. It is what separates the men from the boys in public life. Spin needs the evidence to stay scattered, though. This week, it accumulated.
Buying Union Loyalty With Your Money
The bill’s cover story is genuine enough. The Fair Work Commission is drowning in unfair dismissal claims, half of them, on the Commission’s own commentary, now written by ChatGPT, and a backlog like that needs fixing. Fair enough, makes sense.
But buried inside, in language built not to be noticed, is something that has nothing to do with chatbots or backlogs. It carves the hole in section 354, and the hole has a shape. It lets the Commonwealth favour firms that have done a deal with a union when it hands out contracts, and it even writes in cover so the government can’t be accused of coercion while it does it.
Strip the jargon away and the message is simple. If you want government work, get a union deal.
Now, give the respectable version of this idea its due, because there is one. Governments everywhere use their buying power to police labour standards. If a firm underpays its people or runs sham contracts, taxpayers have every right not to bankroll it, and a government that insists the cleaners and carers on its contracts are paid properly is doing something defensible. If this bill conditioned public work on clean books and legal wages, it would barely rate a mention here.
That is not what it conditions public work on. The test is not how you treat your workers. The test is whether you have signed the agreement, and in the world of government contracting that means the union deal. It rewards the paper, not the practice, and the principle it tramples is freedom of association, the simple idea that a worker, and a business, should be free to join a union or not without government putting its thumb on the scale.
The timing is breathtaking. We are in the middle of the biggest union-corruption scandal in a generation. The CFMEU’s own court-appointed investigator found agreements that had been bought, literally, for cash, and those are the very agreements Labor now wants to turn into a gateway to public contracts and grants. Queensland’s version of this racket, scrapped by the LNP, is before a commission of inquiry for baking union rates in as so-called best practice. In Victoria this week a cornered and febrile Jacinta Allan finally agreed to give the corruption watchdog some teeth over a Big Build the same investigator reckons has been rorted to the tune of $15 billion. At that exact moment, Labor federally decides the way forward is to make a union ticket a passport to the public purse.
Public money is meant to go to whoever does the best job at the best price. Not whoever signed the right piece of paper. Queensland’s experiment did the opposite, driving costs up and productivity down on government jobs. The government swears black and blue that construction will be carved out and that none of this brings back the Queensland scheme, but go looking for that promise in the actual bill and you won’t find it.
Do not let anyone tell you this remit is limited to the realm of construction. The lawyers reading the fine print are sounding the alarm. This rule will follow Commonwealth money wherever it flows, into aged care, defence, technology and professional services, and it reaches all the way down to the subbies. Anywhere government spends, the unions get to go along for the ride and clip the ticket on the way through.
The Quiet Death of 82%
From a carve-out written not to be noticed to a promise being erased the same way. Labor’s signature energy pledge, 82% renewable power by 2030, has been scrubbed from the party’s own platform, and the minister presiding over the funeral is Chris Bowen. His answer is that nothing has changed, and that a platform is merely a high-level statement of principles. Which is exactly the sort of thing a man says when the real number has become an embarrassment.
Credit the idea before counting the delivery. A target exists to move capital, because nobody finances a 30-year asset toward a destination that keeps shifting, and 82% at least had the honesty to admit the sheer scale of the build required. On that logic the pledge did its early job, and money moved.
But a target and a delivery plan are two different things, and only one of them was ever announced. So count the build, because the numbers are brutal.
The grid sits at roughly 40% renewables right now, and he wants 82% in four years. Of the 15 wind farms underwritten by his flagship scheme, not a single one has started construction. Not one. Strip out the batteries, which have gone gangbusters because who doesn’t like free money, and only two of 39 government-backed generation projects have turned a sod. New investment in large-scale wind and solar has roughly halved in a year, from about $9 billion to $4.4 billion. Bowen boasts about gigawatts under contract, but when his own department was hauled before Senate estimates, barely a third of the so-called successful projects had actually signed a deal. The independent forecasters who do this for a living put us at 60% to 65% by 2030, nowhere near 82%.
The people calling it are from his own side. You know it’s bad when even Ross Garnaut says the target will be missed by a big margin, not a little one. Jennie George, a former Labor MP and president of the ACTU, has written the whole scheme off as “magic-pudding economics”. Even the electricians’ union admits the country is tens of thousands of tradespeople short of being able to build the thing. Meanwhile the coal stations that were supposed to be shutting, Eraring, the biggest of the lot, among them, keep getting their sentences commuted, because without them the lights flicker. Just remember the promise that started all this, power bills down by $275. They have gone the other way, and they are still climbing.
So what is Bowen’s response to all of this? To lecture us that the sun cannot be interrupted by a war, and to pick a fight with a journalist who had the temerity to ask him a tough question. That is what weakness looks like in government. This from a minister who lost the bid to host the next UN climate summit, settled for the runner-up gig of chairing its negotiations, and is now costing taxpayers north of $150 million for the privilege. They call it a vanity project, and they are being kind. It would be nice to think Albanese might read the tea leaves on this one, but he is so out of touch that his own energy minister is now the punch line for a joke that needs no premise or setup.
Labor Premiers Read the Room on a Crook Budget
A federal budget is usually a three-day story. You bring it down, the gallery chews it over, the circus moves on. Not this one. Weeks later we are still talking about it, and this week its centrepiece, the self-immolating capital gains tax and negative gearing reforms, cleared the lower house 94 votes to 48 on its way to a Senate brawl Labor is set to win with Green support, though even they complain it does not go far enough.
This is not reform that fixes the budget, nor addresses our cataclysmic and skyrocketing debt. It is ideology that punishes ambition, and it will leave us one of the most punitive places in the developed world to own an asset and build a bit of wealth. We are still talking about it because of the sheer hypocrisy of this government, and because the tax reform in the budget will simply not deliver for housing and investment what it says on the tin.
Here is the part that should frighten the Prime Minister. The sharpest critics of this budget are not limited to those on our side of the fence. They are also on his.
Chris Minns, the very popular Labor premier of New South Wales, has gone after the income tax burden, pointing out that working families now toil the back half of every week for the taxman before they earn a cent for themselves. Roger Cook, the very popular Labor premier of Western Australia, has warned the changes will frighten off the mining investment his state runs on, and says investors here and overseas keep raising it with him. Then yesterday Peter Malinauskas, the most popular premier in the country if not the universe, had his treasurer Tom Koutsantonis hand down a South Australian budget with no new taxes, in part because he didn’t take any to their state election back in March. Instead, he banked every election promise, and took a swing at Canberra on the way through.
When the three most popular Labor leaders in the land are queuing up to tell you the federal budget stings, that is the ultimate litmus test. These blokes are popular precisely because they are tuned in to the needs and aspirations of their states. Three Labor premiers are prosecuting the case against their own side.
Who Is Fit to Replace Them
So let’s join the dots.
On tax, Labor didn’t just dodge the question of capital gains tax and negative gearing changes at the last election, it categorically ruled them out. Albanese was asked point-blank, more than once, whether he would touch them, and he swore he would not, telling one journalist he had already answered the question 50 times over. Dead, buried, cremated. Then he turned around and went even further than Bill Shorten wanted to go.
On renewable energy, 82% by 2030 was the solemn promise, and it’s now being quietly erased too.
This week’s union carve-out never went near an election at all. It went straight to the fine print.
That is not a government that levels with people. Milton Dick might well make sure we never get to see Labor labelled as liars in Hansard, but make no mistake, this is a government that tells you one thing to win your vote, then does the opposite the moment the votes are counted, and in the process it is destroying whatever scrap of trust we had left in the political class.
However, punishing Labor only counts for something if there is a credible government ready to take its place. Right now the polls say the strongest party in the country is One Nation. Pauline Hanson is openly running for prime minister, her party is sitting ahead of Labor on the primary vote, and it has just won the Farrer by-election, which is the first lower-house seat they’ve won at the ballot box. This is also a party that has a former deputy prime minister among their number, with Barnaby Joyce walking out of the Nationals and into One Nation. It is pulling both votes and wannabe defectors off the Coalition at the same time.
Anyone cheering that on should stop and think. As Paul Kelly put it this week in The Australian, a Hanson government would put the nation’s prosperity and its social cohesion at risk, leading a party that, in his words, “has built nothing and shows no capacity to exercise executive power”.
Anger at Labor is entirely earned. But anger is not a plan, and a protest vote is not a government.
Weekly Wrap
A government that treats the truth as optional has earned its day of reckoning, and it’s coming. But a reckoning is not a result.
If we answer Labor’s dishonesty by getting behind Pauline Hanson we are likely going to reward Albo with another three years. Just like those in Victoria might inadvertently do with Jacinta Allan.
This country doesn’t need a louder protest. We need a government in waiting that can count, that can build, and most importantly we need one that can be trusted. Labor has abandoned that ground, and it should never be trusted again. But we get the governments we deserve in the end.
Tony Abbott’s return to the fold as Federal President of the Libs is the shot of adrenaline the Coalition desperately needs. Say what you like about Abbott. Laugh him off, just as Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard did. But how did that work out for them?
The only question that matters between now and the next election is whether the Liberals and the Nationals are willing to stand for something and draw the battle lines that credibly separate them from Labor, or whether they keep running the race to the bottom and forget about the forgotten people.
The forgotten people seem ready to give Pauline a go.