Bernard Keane encapsulates Joyce’s strategy:

Alan Joyce’s logic is the elegant reasoning of a terrorist.

If the result of his massive disruption of the Australian transport system is the further shredding of the Qantas brand, which began under Geoff Dixon and which has accelerated rapidly under his Irish successor, and leads to further service cuts as Australians turns their back on the airline, that’s fine.

It will merely expedite his plans to offshore-by-stealth Qantas, wrecking the Australian-based operation while he sets about establishing lower-cost, more competitive foreign-based services.

To this end, a furious reaction against the airline for its act of malice toward Australian travellers is a price well worth paying; indeed, it may be part of the longer-term plan.

Joyce’s actions and motivations are almost a parody of the globalising logic that profits are all, workers, customers and any notion of public service or good nothing. And it’s in that quality of excess, in the gamble for high stakes, that his house of cards has the real potential to come tumbling down.

It shouldn’t escape notice that the Chair of the Qantas Board, Leigh Clifford, hails from Rio Tinto, a company long known for its overt deunionisation strategy. There is undoubtedly an element of union busting in all this, as well as a broader push from the more militant elements of the Australia corpocracy to smash the Fair Work Act. Peter Reith’s high profile interventions have to be seen in this context.

Hence, Qantas’ other play here, through keeping its cards close to its chest and failing to inform the government of the planned lockout (let alone passengers), was to force the government to bring the dispute before Fair Work Australia. Hence, too, Anthony Albanese’ fury.

But, as Bernard Keane also observes, there is real opportunity for the government.

There is no doubt that Qantas’ public relations offensive has failed. Essential Research found last week that 43% of respondents supported renationalisation of the airline, a large number blamed Qantas management rather than workers, and very large majorities opposed offshoring and thought Joyce’s remuneration too high.

The polling is not unambiguous, but there’s a plethora of pointers to how Joyce’s sneak attack has resonated, from a Facebook protest page which garnered almost 4000 likes in less than 24 hours, to the reaction on Twitter. The timing, coming on top of his huge pay rise on Friday, and the massive disruption and frustration caused to passengers on a Saturday afternoon, is so stupid as to beggar belief.

Joyce has exemplified the mindset of the 1% at a time when the Occupy X movement has successfully put systemic critique back on the agenda.

So, how does all this have the potential to backfire on Joyce?

First, it’s being discussed by many as the most spectacular example of management aggression since Patrick’s locked out its workers on the docks in 1998. Unlike the waterfront dispute, the impact on the public is much more palpable and much more direct.

Secondly, as Ben Schneiders correctly observes in the Sydney Morning Herald today, there is the potential for Fair Work Australia to arbitrate the dispute, a power now rarely used, and only available to the tribunal in the case of significant disruption to the national economy. The Minister, Chris Evans, could also make orders to both sides to cease industrial action, though that would be a last resort. The Fair Work Act emphasises bargaining in good faith, and it may well be that the tribunal will find that Qantas has not been. Then, there are legal questions over whether extending the lockout to employees who were not engaging in industrial action, and standing down others, is lawful.

Given that Qantas is seeking to put FWA on trial, and that the legislation is so closely identified with Julia Gillard, the arguments put by the Commonwealth will repay close watching. It would also be surprising if there were not pressure to tighten the provisions whereby management (unlike unions) does not have to give genuine notice of its intent to pursue industrial action. Qantas’ actions in grounding its fleet immediately, and alleging that the lockout would not begin on Monday, are specious in the extreme.

It’s crucial to remember that Joyce, far from pulling his fleet from the sky as a “response to union action”, has himself, according to the legal definition, taken industrial action.

More broadly, as Schneiders comments, there may be momentum for a broader use of the arbitration power, to protect the public interest.

Thirdly, Qantas faces some pointed questioning over its obligations under the Qantas Act which enabled privatisation. There are specific provisions, reflected in the airline’s own constitution, which require it to maintain its operations in Australia, and restrict it from flying internationally under another name. The unions have corresponded with Qantas about this, and the management line has been that subsidiaries are not bound. But Senate hearings have been examining legislation introduced by Nick Xenophon and Greens Leader Bob Brown which would close off this option. If such amendments were to be supported by the government, we would be in a very interesting place indeed.

And finally, as Bernard Keane writes:

Voters, it seems, just want their old Qantas back. In the view of Joyce and the Qantas board, they can’t get it back in the airline’s current form, not given continuing strong competition from government-subsidised foreign airlines and the high dollar. The only way to get the old Qantas back may indeed be to nationalise it and subsidise it, or to return to the days when competition from foreign airlines was even more tightly restricted than it is now.

And no one in federal politics is pushing those options. Well, not yet.

In a climate when the recklessness and contempt of corporate power reveals its naked face, the government would have little to lose, and much to gain, from reining it in. We shall see.

Alan Joyce is being crazy brave. So, too, should Julia Gillard be.

NB: To keep comments focused, please leave your response on Helen’s open thread. Comments on this post are closed.

Update: Laura Tingle.

What it also shows (again) is that Julia is a master negotiator. Doing what Rudd was pretty loathe to ever do she actually got involved with negotiations with Senators and got the job done.

Let me be bold and say this right now: we will have a price on carbon before the next election*. It will be a shitty, God awful, drag-down, knock them out negotiation, and then Julia will get involved and the deal will be done. This is a woman who knows how to work with people, and most of all she bloody well likes to win.

By the way, the summary of the NBN business case, released as part of the deal, spends three out of the 36 pages discussing its risk management policies. I suspect they may have considered the odd piece of wet weather – one of the easiest risks to quantify – in their cost estimates (earlier LP post here).

Anyway, Abbott’s latest effort, at the Menzies Research Centre yesterday, had some very similar blah to his last one – you know the drill by now: “party of ideas”, “constructive opposition” and so on, framing lots of statements like “we will oppose” this or that. After all, Abbott says, you don’t win government by agreeing on stuff… Oh really? John Howard circa 1995 and 1996 might disagree.

Somehow, he still hopes that government will fall into his lap. I’m not sure, then, why he’s gone to so much effort to annoy the Independents over the fracturing parliamentary reform agreement. Given that it was a signed document, the whole notion of “only believe what I put in writing” seems to be a thing of the past.

In pursuing a constructive course (supposedly), Abbott’s first cab off the rank isn’t anything as blatantly political as some of the thought bubbles (perhaps attributable to Christopher Pyne) about putting up motions calling on the government to give billions of dollars to hospitals in Denison, Lyne and New England, but some legislation. Abbott will show he is not just about opposition by putting forward a bill to overturn the Queensland government’s Wild Rivers legislation. Think about that for a moment (being constructive by stopping, overturning).

This, I presume, is mainly designed to ensure that the government is defeated on the floor of the House. And also so the Coalition can make a lot of noise about greenies, Labor states and its Noel Pearson endorsed primacy on Indigenous issues.

Of course, the Gillard government has already acknowledged that it may be defeated on the floor of the House. And that won’t matter unless it’s a confidence vote or a supply bill.

The other thing Abbott may not have factored in is that the politics of opposition will be different this term. He won’t just have to convince The Australian‘s leader writers and opinionistas, but actually make a case on the merits to the Independents. Nick Xenophon has already said he’ll be willing to listen to both the Queensland government and those Indigenous people who oppose Pearson’s stance (and they’re out today saying they’ll be taking that case to Canberra).

It’s a very complex policy issue, and if the various positions are actually subject to deliberation and public debate, “defeating the government” may not be either as easy as the Coalition might presume nor mean what they think it will mean.

There’s no doubt that there are problems with Facebook’s method of dealing with offensive content. But the fundamental errors in this debate are twofold:

(a) Social networking sites are far more akin to phone networks than a traditional publishing model. A huge multiplicity of users constantly and simultaneously post content. Unlike talking on a phone, it leaves a permanent trace, but it’s a much better analogy;

(b) The direction of causation is the wrong way round. It’s not that the internet encourages people to do dumb and wrong things. It’s that people do dumb and wrong things, and they do them on the internet too.

The noise coming from politicians, and the ‘solutions’, make one wonder whether they understand at all how social networking works. Part of the problem is one very easily resolved through taking more responsibility on the part of group creators for the little bit of the internet they set up, and using privacy and content management tools intelligently.

There’s an interesting take on all this from Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia, from whom I’ve borrowed the title of this post, and for a deeper examination of the issues, I’d also recommend the Oxford Internet Institute’s report on balancing freedom of speech and child protection online, which seeks to find some common ground between interlocutors who often seem to talk past one another.

In the intervening period, I’ve been surprised that so little attention has been paid to the negotiations between Senator Penny Wong and Senator Christine Milne on behalf of The Greens, which began last week. I’ve sought to emphasise that there are possibilities of Senate passage via a Liberal floor crosser (perhaps Judith Troeth, who is retiring) and Nick Xenophon. In any event, I’ve argued that there are political benefits for Labor in staking out a new position which could demonstrate the desire for immediate action, and perhaps take a different bill to a double dissolution.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that the media would ignore these developments, but I’ve also been surprised at the attitude of a number of commenters on several threads, which seems to assume that Labor’s posture is somehow frozen in stone.

So, in light of all this, I was very interested indeed to hear Bob Brown give a very articulate and well argued interview to Tony Jones on Lateline tonight where he discussed these negotiations, and revealed that he had also been talking to other non-Government Senators.

“The collapse of the Continue Polluting Regardless Scheme provides Australia with a great opportunity to move ahead with ambitious action on the climate crisis,” Australian Greens Deputy Leader, Senator Christine Milne, said.

“The CPRS would have locked in failure on the climate crisis with its inexcusably weak emissions target and its $16 billion handout to polluters. Three in four Australians support the Greens’ decision to reject the bill if the Government refused to toughen it up.

“The collapse of the CPRS opens the door to a suite of other measures that can be implemented immediately, before an amended CPRS returns to the Parliament, in order to begin reducing Australia’s emissions without delay.”

The Greens are probably mostly correct that the proposed measures were too timid, but was their strategy of blocking this bill in hopes of getting a more effective one the right strategic choice? Xenophon agrees with them that the targets were too low, with extra opprobrium for what he considers unnecessarily expensive plans.

Family First’s Fielding voted with the Greens to block because he still isn’t convinced that human activity is causing global warming at all. (Question for the Senator: is it possible for humans to ameliorate the effects of phenomena they don’t actually cause? e.g. floods, fires, earthquakes? Yes? Why not do something in this situation then?) The Senate Nationals seem to be of the same mind.

So now the Government have to turn to the Senate Liberals to get this bill through, and those Senators appear to favour waiting to see what the rest of the world has to say in Copenhagen (at the U.N. Climate Change Conference) rather than have Australia show any initiative in implementing our own effective scheme.

So there’s two camps of people standing on separate principles arguing that the CPRS was wrong wrongitty wrong either because it gutlessly didn’t do enough to make a difference or was recklessly diverting scarce resources into a non-existent problem, while various pragmatists are mourning a lost opportunity to at least take a first step in cutting emissions. What can we expect regarding emissions targets now?

While Nick Xenophon is straight from the Brian Harradine school of independent Senators, at least the bloke seems to understand how to negotiate to achieve the best result he can get. Fielding, at the moment, is turning the passage of any particular legislation through the Senate into a coin-tossing exercise. The sooner the Senate numbers change to remove him from his current position of influence, the better off we will all be.

The real irony here is it’s the bloke in the middle [Malcolm Turnbull] that’s probably the one completely sh*tting himself, because if this package fails to get through the Senate, the fallout against Turnbull by the public will be enormous. Every piece of bad news will become his fault in the mind of a huge chunk of the public – Labor will make sure of it. That better economic manager series we looked at earlier might become a nostalgic golden age for the Coalition.

It now appears that the legislation will be passed again by the House of Representatives – where no doubt all guns will be trained on the Opposition – and be returned to the Senate tomorrow while negotiations continue. It will probably pass after some more horsetrading, though that’s not certain. Labor will be dramatising the near miss, and putting all the blame on Turnbull rather than Xenophon and Fielding.

This is hardly a fabulous situation for the country, but the politics could hardly get any better for the government. A few points to make:

(1) There are currently no bills which have been rejected twice by the Senate with a three month interval so there is no available trigger for a double dissolution.

(2) In theory, Kevin Rudd could ask the Governor-General for a dissolution of the House of Representatives if the Senate rejects the legislation tomorrow, on the grounds that the situation is urgent and the government wants to seek the endorsement of the people for these measures. The composition of the Senate wouldn’t be changed, obviously, because you can’t hold a half Senate election at will, if my recollection of the constitutional provisions is accurate.

Possum’s measure of the trend of all the polls currently has Labor on 59% 2PP. Let’s go back to the bottom of the range for an assumed election result – 56%. The Liberal seats would still be falling like dominoes.

An election in the very near future isn’t a likely scenario, but contemplation of the likely outcome should be very frightening indeed for the Coalition.

(3) There are some indications, however, that the government is contemplating an election – whether double dissolution or not – later this year.

(4) It’s not necessarily PR that magnifies the influence of Nick Xenophon and Steve Fielding – but rather the election of Senators by state combined with PR.

(5) The Greens have come out of this episode looking good – as a responsible party prepared to allow the government to achieve its objectives with some tweaking. As opposed to Fielding and Xenophon whose calculation of their electoral chances seems to incline them to make as much noise and cause as much drama as possible. I’m inclined to agree that contra-deals and unrelated demands are undesirable – as Joshua Gans says, whatever the merits of Xenophon’s proposals, they really have nothing to do with the objectives of the legislation. I think the government consistently tries to resist this sort of thing, and I think they’re right to do so. No doubt a Senate with the balance of power held by The Greens would actually be both more favourable for Labor and for good governance as well.

(6) In the unlikely event that no stimulus package is passed, I suppose the neo-liberal anti-Keynesian mob would get an answer to the question of whether their default position of the government doing basically nothing is the road to recovery. It’s a little more complex than that, but as has been noted here, that’s the corner Malcolm Turnbull has allowed himself to be painted into, and all the noise from the free market mob is going to be poison for the Coalition.

(7) Malcolm had better hope that there’s no recession, because he’s pretty close to owning it if there is. I’m not the only one to make the point again and again that using Senate numbers to in effect take responsibility for legislation was a disastrous strategy for the Labor opposition, and it is one for the Coalition as well – as indeed some Coalition MPs from both ends of the ideological fence – ie Christopher Pyne and Nick Minchin – argued in their partyroom.

(8) If there’s any future for the Liberal party in the medium term, they need to be ground into the dust electorally first – it seems like there’s nothing else that will actually teach them the lessons of why they lost office. And we’re entering a period where their default message will have less and less resonance – possibly for a very long time.

Update: Courtesy of danny in comments, our attention has been drawn to a comprehensive post by Antony Green on the options for an election. Looks like I was right in thinking at point (2) that an election called now would have to be for the House of Representatives only. As Green notes, there are precedents, though such a call would be the first time an election was used to teach the Senate a lesson.

Update: Possum on why Turnbull was praying that Xenophon would vote for the package today, Sam Clifford assessing the role of the minors in Senate negotiations, and Bernard Keane on Xenophon.

For a start, I was under the impression that there’s essentially bugger-all physical water available on the market to buy back at the moment, so bringing forward the buyback of water entitlements doesn’t actually accelerate the return of water to the environment.

Second, payments to irrigators through the buyback and structural adjustment schemes, during a drought, doesn’t seem like it’s a good way to encourage consumption and investments. Most of the money will be used to pay off debt, rather than invested (if you were an irrigator, would you invest a dollar in your business at the moment?) or consumed. Paying off debt might be good for the farmers but wouldn’t seem to achieve the kind of “multiplier effect” that is the holy grail of all these schemes.

As far as bringing forward infrastructure spending, in principle that seems to be in line with what the experts are recommending, but it’s very different to the kind of small-scale projects that are being provided for with this bill. It seems, instead, to be the kind of large-scale, elaborate infrastructure that is being dealt with (hopefully) more systematically by the Infrastructure Australia process. As others have noted, this smells like an American-style earmark.

The Murray-Darling needs help, and it seems that economic stimulus is a good idea. But, on first glance, it doesn’t seem like a particularly sensible way of doing either.

Independent Senator Nick Xenophon has dashed the Government’s hopes of implementing its $42 billion economic stimulus package by voting to reject it.

Earlier today the passage of the legislation appeared doomed as Senator Nick Xenophon vowed he would not support the package without the inclusion of an amendment to bring forward funds to save the Murray-Darling Basin.

Peter Martin’s take: “Malcolm Turnbull no longer has the best of both worlds. He opposed the package, and it got rejected.”

Earlier, the Greens had negotiated a number of what seem to be quite sensible amendments to the package, knocking off some of the bonus for higher-income earners, to spend on things like bike paths and making a bonus available to a greater proportion of the unemployed. Pensions are also under review for the Budget.

In any case, the fun and games really begin now.

Elsewhere: Possum [h/t comments]

Update: some thoughts on the merits of Xenophon’s proposals.

Update [by MB]: A post on the politics of today’s developments.