The ACCI and the BCA are funding a pro-WorkChoices campaign. Non-partisan, apparently, though you don’t have to have a very good memory to recall senior Liberals very pointedly advising them that they’d like some support against the ACTU and ALP. We’re also likely to have our tv sets invaded by more “informational” advertising about the fairness test. I think the biz groups could well have saved their money. The whole point of the unpopularity of WorkChoices is that it’s seen to be far too slanted towards the interests of employers. That perception is going to be reinforced by their funding of pro-WorkChoices ads, if people don’t just get thoroughly fed up with TEH LONGEST ELECTION CAMPAIGN EVER. In the latter case, hostility towards the message is likely to be the result as well.
Meanwhile, the Canadian Supreme Court has held that collective bargaining is a basic human right. That appears to be understood in every OECD country bar Australia. So I can’t see why it’s “unpatriotic” or whatever for the union movement here to draw the attention of the ILO to labour laws which breach human rights. But the debate we’re having about IR is hardly a rational and balanced one.
That’s something that was illustrated by the irony that Joe Hockey chose to re-incarnate himself as Shrek on breakfast tv, while scrupulously abstaining from actually defending the nitty gritty of the government’s policy on SBS’ Insight. Peter Martin has a great post up which dwells on the Minister’s absence, and also the absence of any economic modelling or research to validate the claims made for WorkChoices. Over at Troppo, Chris Sheil also writes about the SBS show.
Elsewhere: Tim Dunlop at Blogocracy.
Although undoubtedly a boon for the ad agencies, it’s a bit hard to know where they can possibly go with this. We’ve already had the discredited happy smiling workers theme, so unless they’re going to ramp up the union ogre campaign what they’ll be left with is the usual meaningless corporate dross.
The anti-WorkChoices campaign, and the reality of the legislation, has had over two years to sink into the national psyche. No amount of TV spots from a bunch of manifestly self-interested profiteers in the final months of an election campaign is likely to change anything.
Keep ‘em coming. The policy is such a lame and diseased pup, encouraging further public scrutiny can only play badly for the Rodent.
I love Howard’s (& now the business unions’) newfound and near infallible sense of how to piss off the public.
Its textbook:
- Rob the punters blind with Serfchoices
- lengthen the campaign to 9 tiresome months
- look utterly bloated on their tax dollars every ad break
- recklessly squander economic management rep every ad break
- water every suspicion the ACTU campaign planted by encouraging a bosses campaign for Serfchoices
- bullshit them all day long, inviting interest they may not otherwise have had in the facts of IR, cos you’re PISSING THEM OFF.
- release no economic analysis of benefits (none available), increase spin
- run a mile from all actual scrutiny on the issues
- declare the punters idiots by leaving a daft fat clown out front instead.
- practically dare them to vote you down in droves.
The libs have gone soft. First sign of a fight in 9 years and they’ve reverted into rubbish student union amateurs on shit-sheet nite in daddy’s Merc.
Listen here, Lib HQ - you know that feeling you’re relying on, that moment in the ballot box where the punter wodner “do I trust Rudd?” etc.
Well, frankly, the way you guys are running this in the ground 6 months out, that moment is going to be more like
“Howard - SHUT. THE. F*CK. UP. NOW. “
Lefty, I suspect they know it’s useless. It’s just that after shelling out $8,000 each for cheese and Jatz at Kirribilli House they’re still receiving daily nuisance calls from the fuehrer-bunker and they’re hoping this will shut him up.
I get the impression they’re trying to convince themselves with the ads. Help maintain the web of denial, etc.
Given the number of organisations involved the end result is bound to look like it was produced by a committee.
The difficulty the government faces with these ads is that they’re being made for industry associations and thus must satisfy many different stakeholders. As a result, the ads will be bland and useless.
Also, the Peter Martin post that Mark highlights really skewers Hockey’s avoidance of the debate. For example, Hockey staff claimed he needed to spend time in his electorate, but he has a 10 percent margin. More importantly, the Insight studio is actually in his electorate, and not far from his morning appearances at Channel 9.
As Martin points out, perhaps Uncle Joe didn’t think it would be a good look to be talking about Fairness Tests with young people who had actually been sacked.
Ouch. The Martin piece is scathing, and absolutely dead-on. It’s going to be a fun week in parliament.
Meh, obviously the unions’ anti-WorkChoices ad campaign is going to be more effective. It’s easy to scare people; and it’s not as if they can claim to be non-partisan on the issue. So what if the Coalition wants to run something to counter that?
Did anyone see last night’s 7.30 Report with its expose of unsafe work practices at Mt Newman in WA? They had worker after worker talking about dangerous incidents and fears that someone was going to be killed and a company man who kept saying, without once looking into the camera, that safety was the company’s main concern.
It was the ultimate disconnect. I suspect the employer ads on Workchoices will be the same.
But they are just amateurs at the scare game, having nothing on the master of fear. Howard has not gone into a single campaign and barely makes a single media appearance without raising a scare of one kind or another.
Along with the economy, Howard is thought of by the electorate as being better at security, but like his credibility on the economy this is an absolute myth, and if anyone (and many professionals have) looks in detail at his so called security (and economic) credentials they find lots of holes being covered with a veneer of spin.
TimT, the problem is that the business campaign will depend on fabrication and obfuscation to a greater degree than the union one - because they need to. The union campaign at least has a basis in the truth - Workchoices is about driving down wages and conditions. And it’s working. The proporition of income earned as wages is dropping - while profits increase. Yes, workchoices will help those with sought after skills. But what about the rest?
I don’t even accept that to be the case. Those with skills in demand can already leverage them through common law contracts and collective bargaining.
I wonder if there has been an agreement made on the QT that the cost of these ads will count as a legitimate business expense. If so, would that count as corruption on the part of the Government? Or are the political donation controls so lax that this would walk through?
If collective bargaining is a human right, then I’ve also got a human right to be stinking rich. What a load of tripe - Judges demonstrating, once again, comlete detatchment from reality.
Dear me,
So it’s the right to be rich now is it? You orta get an International Convention drafted on that one. Everyone will sign up to that! Why didn’t someone think of that before?
Razor, the right to collectively bargain is a subset of freedom of association.
That is, it relies on the same right that supports arguments against compulsory unionism.
Cant have it both ways dude.
Rising star Peter Martin (mentioned favourably above) is one to watch.
He’s razor sharp, not like some others around these here parts.
I think Wayne Swan has the right attitude:
Albury’s The Border Mail reports:
“Labor says it has no problem with business putting across its point of view.
“It’s a free society, if they want to run some ads they can,� Opposition treasury spokesman Wayne Swan said.
Labor had not, and would not, lobby the business groups in a bid to convince them not to proceed with the ads, he said.”
Had Labor not taken this position, I would have seriously started to question how fit they are to fight this upcoming federal election.
Especially when it’s already been a struggle to evaluate the very mixed message put out by Labor over Industrial Relations.
Note an important reference point as a way of reflecting on Labor’s recent declining performance in the IR debate:
On 1st of March 2007, employment minister Joe Hockey said in the House of Representatives:
“I note that the Labor Party has had, to the best of my knowledge, seven different policies on unfair dismissal laws in seven months. They are not only walking both sides of the street on unfair dismissal laws; they are stuck on a Canberra roundabout and they cannot get off.”
These words may yet come back to haunt Kevin Rudd because the detail of Labor’s policy risks pleasing no one critical to a successful outcome(walking both sides of the street), while their struggle to move from policy detail to policy detail indicates Labor lacks a “roundabout concept” they can keep refering to, such as the way the Howard Government keep guiding all debate back to “economic management”.
To quote Edward de Bono:
“It is impossible to move sideways from detail to detail. You need to go back to a concept and find a way forward out of that concept.” [1]
It shouldn’t be that difficult to grasp that Joe Hockey at least knows how to “keep it simple, stupid!”.
Which constrasts with Peter Martin’s argument that Hockey was last week
stuck in FantasyLand playing Shrek, while “SBS TV broadcasts real programs featuring real people”.
“The reality” is that Channel Nine rates higher than SBS ever will, no matter what peaks in the ratings on SBS. Such comments only build evidence to the claim by Ed from The Australian this week that the Leftist commentariat causes “a class divide between an elite on one side and the mass of ordinary people on the other” (no matter how true or untrue you think this comment is).
Given Labor’s “reality” of needing to win 17 seats from the Government, without going backwards to lose its own seats, Hockey’s critics on the Left would be wiser to observe Mr. Hockey’s tactics with grit teeth, rather than leap to using his Shrek moment as a reference to compare “reality” with
A much important point Peter Martin makes is that “the proportion of national income going to wages has fallen to an all time low”.
It’s on this precise point the conservatives are at their most arrogrant, as demonstrated by Ed from The Australian today:
“More fundamental than rights at work is the right to work at all”
This is a conservative world view only too happy to support the statistical definition of employment, counting anyone who undertakes paid work for one hour as effectively being “productive”.
Labor need to attack the silly conservative subtext extracted from low unemployment figures that “there’s no disadvantage - we’re all aspirational now”.
An effective “roundabout concept” for Labor may yet be Brian Howe’s concept of “anticipating risks people confront across their lifetime”, similar to the concept I’m trying to send around the thinking roundabout
for road testing: the concept of “personal development”.
…From Justin
[1] De Bono, Edward. Simplicity. 1998 Viking. Page 285.
None of the other papers bothered to pick it up, as best I can tell, but the print version of the Canberra Times reports plans by the Department of Workplace Relations to commission economic modelling designed to make the Government’s industrial relations programs look good and the Opposition’s look bad.
One request for tender seeks a consultant to model what it calls “the economic benefits” of the Coalition’s agenda, while the other seeks a consultant to model what in that case is called “the economic costs” of Labor’s program.
The process was exposed by Julia Gillard in Question Time. Jo Hockey confirmed the documents Gillard used were genuine.
As the CT notes: “The document dealing with the Coalition’s program asks the tenderer to include in the modelling the impact of a higher working age labour force participation rate - 78 per cent instead of the present 76 per cent - apparently on the assumption that is what the Coalition’s program would bring about.
“The document dealing with Labor’s program asks the tenderer to include a lower partipation rate - 74 per cent as opposed to the present 76 per cent - again on the apparent assumption that that is what Labor’s program would do.”
Economics Editor Peter Martin notes that that approach would as good as guarantee that the modelling would conclude the Coalition’s program would boost employment and Labor’s harm it.
Even worse, the document dealing with Labor’s policy asks the tenderer to assume it brings on an explosion in pattern bargaining and/or industry wide bargaining as opposed to having collective and individual agreements that are able to take account of firm-specific circumstances.
Yet as Martin notes, neither pattern nor industry-wide bargaining feature in the ALP’s approach.
The Coalition Government disgusts me and always has, but to find public servants colluding with them on this kind of deception fills me with heartache and despair.
I think you’ll find the story is online and is linked in this post.
No, I am referring to a news story from this morning’s paper. Not the one linked to in the post.
Ok, thanks.