There is only one trade union leader worth listening to according to Tony Abbott, and she of course is Kathy Jackson of the Health Services Union.
The Opposition Leader considers her a courageous hero and probably would rush her to sainthood were he not a well-disciplined Catholic boy.
Ms Jackson earned her place as the lone occupant of the Liberals’ Trade Union Hall of Fame by sending HSU files on her predecessor Craig Thomson to the NSW police as they started assessing whether the activities of the Labor MP should be investigated.
It was a perfectly proper thing to her to do. Then some micro-brained dill left a dirty shovel outside her door, causing Mr Abbott to become more distressed over her safety than Ms Jackson herself.
These are political theatrics, but they are having a genuine and dramatic effect on the Labor side of the equation in many ways.
One is they are damaging the standing of the trade union movement at a time when its leaders need full authority to protect members’ jobs.
“They are trying to tar us with the same brush,’’ said the AWU’s Paul Howes last week after a cheeky Liberal staffer implied he was using union members’ dues to buy drinks at a Canberra bar.
That’s the Thomson brush. Now, all union leaders will be stained by the Jackson shovel as well.
Manufacturing in Australia is crumbling towards extinction for many reasons, including the high value of the Australian dollar, caused by the mining boom, which makes imports cheaper, and the decade or more of neglect of national infrastructure by government.
Mr Howes and the AMWU’s Dave Oliver were in Canberra to move the Government to stem the job shedding in the manufacturing sector that threatens to become a weekly occurrence for big companies. It already is among smaller ones.
One of the prominent issues in this debate is productivity, and to a significant degree this is being narrowly translated as a need for de-regulation of employment laws. (Interestingly, Kathy Jackson and Julia Gillard came to know one another as they stood against WorkChoices, the former policy of Mr Abbott.)
The union movement’s resistance to tougher workplace laws will not be helped by the Opposition depicting all union leaders (bar one) as shovel planters and brothel creepers.
We will see more allegations against trade union figures in the coming weeks, although few of them will be fresh accusations. One consequence could be that much of the union movement will be at least distracted from – or even disqualified from – this crucial debate.
Tony Abbott has already declared the Labor Party is corrupt, based on the officially unsubstantiated claims against Mr Thomson and one soiled gardening implement. He will be interested in using this charge to depict the Gillard government as like the previous Labor government of NSW – inept and frozen by its own scandals.
It would be part of his campaign against the legitimacy of the minority Labor government and the personal integrity of Julia Gillard over her carbon tax “lie.”
(Related to that claim, last week it was pointed out to Mr Abbott by an interviewer that Arts Minister Simon Crean had been given a written assurance by the Opposition that he would be paired for the Margaret Olley memorial. “Circumstances changed,’’ is how Mr Abbott explained the broken agreement.)
The Opposition‘s skillful and endless bid to convince voters the Gillard government is not just worse than Whitlam’s, but corrupt as well, will be pushed along by the attacks on union leaders. It will be much harder to argue the government has stopped functioning because of all the hubbub over Mr Thomson and related matters.
The Government actually has been pretty busy. The general public might understandably think the last two weeks saw Parliament overwhelmed by the Thomson allegations. In fact, 22 bills were passed during the fortnight, bringing to 185 the total for the first year of this government.
The most recent bills included laws on plain packaging of cigarettes, a major component of the national health reform, and laws to fight dumping here of artificially cheap products by overseas companies.
Further, there was a start made to create a Parliamentary Budget Office to independently test the integrity and cost of financial proposals – from all parties.
Debate has started and broadly it is a non-partisan issue, although shadow treasurer Joe Hockey has some quite reasonable qualms about lack of confidentiality of the PBO work.
It doesn’t sound thrilling to most, but this is a major advance towards ending shonky economic policy, and the bill will succeed with essentially all-party backing.
But it’s not something the public heard much about during a week which might have foreshadowed a period of union bashing.
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