Last Saturday my memory, listening on NewsRadio, is that Gillard was conducting a media wrap-up session at the CHOGM Conference in Perth around the middle of the day. The last thing she needed with 54 heads of government and/or foreign ministers plus thousands of delegates about to leave for home after a successful conference which brought considerable credit to Australia was for some clown to ground the Qantas air fleet. If I’ve got the timing right, Joyce’s announcement at 2 pm AEDT would have been at 11 am Perth time. At noon Perth time three soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.

I understand that Gillard was able to confer with the relevant senior ministers during lunch about the Qantas dispute.

Joyce’s timing could scarcely have been worse.

I heard on the radio that Labor ministers were incandescent with rage over Joyce’s stunt. The Australian Financial Review yesterday reported that the Government believes it was deliberately blind-sided. They say that the Government had previously played down the notion that there may be a problem flowing from Qantas’ Asian plans. Now Albanese has said:

“We will not countenance any breach of the act.

“We have a watching brief, and as Qantas makes announcements or makes its position clear as issues develop with regards to plans for restructuring, the government will seek advice as that is made.”

According to the AFR:

The act, designed to ensure the Australian character of Qantas is retained, prohibits the airline from flying international passenger services under a name other than Qantas and requires the majority of Qantas International’s maintenance, administration, training, catering and flight operations facilities to remain in Australia.

There was a press report that Gillard had failed to take a call from Joyce. He corrected that, saying that he hadn’t thought it necessary to bother her because he knew she was busy with CHOGM and he made contact with the relevant ministers. She may have taken this as an insult. Would he have not bothered to contact Howard, kaeting or hawke under similar circumstances? I’m speculating, but on Monday Laura Tingle’s article told us:

One thing is sure, a prime minister deeply angered by what she clearly sees as an attempt by Qantas to blindside the government, was on the warpath on Monday, confident of her ground and not taking any prisoners.

Also:

Gillard was unapologetic on Monday about the wider grounds for dispute. She says that job security – “of course” – should be something workers should be able to entitled to discuss with employers.

Yesterday the front page lead was Gillard takes unions’ side:

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has unapologetically asserted workers’ right to bargain on job security, in the face of employer arguments that management must be free to manage without interference.

Gillard has also said that it is “not appropriate” for workers to agree on pay with their employers and then find contractors given the work at cheaper rates, making the workers redundant. This is a specific concern of the baggage handlers.

Apparently a scheduled review on the fair work Australia act is coming up next year. One specific change expected is a requirement on employers to give adequate notice of lock-out action. It’s noteworthy here that Andrew Stewart, an expert in industrial law, said the other day that Qantas could have arrived at the same place by giving a week’s notice of such action. Joyce’s “nuclear option” was in his view unnecessary overkill.

Qantas and employers generally must now be wondering what other changes to the FWA Act will be put forward, especially with an alienated Government dependent on cross-bench support.

The whole “keep business satisfied” implementation agenda might have seemed like a good idea last year. It’s not looking so flash now, particularly as the ACTU finally wakes up to the fact that they’ve effectively been locked out of the policy making process.

Elsewhere: More discussion of the poll at The Poll Bludger. Also interesting is the comparison with ratings of attributes between Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd (with the proviso that the data on Rudd dates from June). Turnbull will be worried at the 47% “out of touch” figure. How do you actually turn that around? Brendan Nelson didn’t do so by emoting and going trucking.

Julia Gillard outlined the results of consultations and more of the shape of the policy which will be embodied in legislation soon to be introduced into Parliament in an address to the National Press Club yesterday. The transcript is here. Commentary is largely focused on the unfair dismissal changes for small business, and there’s a sample of the reaction in a good article summarising union and academic views in The Age. But equally important are the machinations going on in the Industrial Relations Commission over “modern awards”, where employers have been presenting what are basically award-stripping ambit claims, and some odd interventions from Gillard herself [the process was examined in a previous LP post by Senator Rachel Siewert of The Greens] and the rather weak protections for collective bargaining that have been outlined.

It’s all very well to say that Fair Work Australia will be able to make good faith bargaining orders, but if they’re only weakly enforceable, and if there’s no power to arbitrate in the face of, well, bad faith, then it seems somewhat of a fig leaf. The ongoing legal maneouvring Telstra have engaged in, which has just had a setback with employees rejecting a non-union collective agreement in a Commission ordered ballot, is a case in point. Differential pay offers (which have nothing to do with rewarding merit and performance and everything to do with de-unionisation), legal stalling, failure to recognise bargaining agents and “wait them out” negotiating are all weapons in the armoury of management strategy, and it’s far from clear from what Gillard had to say that these tactics couldn’t be employed by business under the new laws.

Many Labor MPs aren’t happy campers at the moment, among others. Kevin Rudd’s cosy meetings with Fairfax management have not gone down well, and MPs are concerned that their constituents have been let down. IR is going to be back on the political agenda in a big way in the very near future, and the sentiment in the community for employment rights and the union’s third party campaigning skills now represent as much of a political danger for Labor as they were a political plus in the 2007 federal election.