This week the ACTU is meeting to finalise its election strategy against the Howard government. Doug Cameron, the left-wing union leader, was reported in The Australian Financial Review yesterday as saying that unions would support the election of a Latham Labor government with "renewed vigour". That's hardly surprising.
Labor has promised to wind back not only the coalition's, but also the Hawke and Keating industrial relations reforms.
The belief that the financial and industrial relations changes of the 1980s and 1990s are now embedded in the country's economic and political system is wrong.
Australia achieved, literally, world-record rates of economic growth precisely because we abolished many of the measures that Labor is now proposing to reintroduce.
Labor is committed to restoring the central role of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, eliminating individual workplace agreements, and giving unions further automatic rights to enter workplaces.
Most dangerous is the proposal to discriminate in favour of companies that are "union-friendly" in the awarding of government contracts. If the Liberals suggested that companies that were "workers' choice-friendly" should gain such a preference there would be an outcry. But when it's Labor and the unions, the situation is taken for granted.
The $40 million that the union movement has donated to the ALP since 1995 delivers a lot of influence.
The problem for Australian democracy is that one of our two major political parties has access to substantial resources (both financial and human) while the other does not.
Last year, Labor raised at least $2million more than the Liberals.
Liberals can no longer rely on their traditional funding base from the private sector. Increasingly, companies are deciding either not to make political donations at all or, if they do, they are contributing in equal proportions to both parties.
This decision is short-sighted and self-defeating. It is the result of the timidity of directors in the face of a feared backlash from company stakeholders.
The irony is that the stakeholders the directors are attempting to placate are usually hostile to the company, and antagonistic to the notion of the market economy that allows the company to operate in the first place.
The consequences of business vacating the political field to the ACTU and a growing coalition of left-wing interests is starting to become obvious.
Labor's industrial relations policy is one example. Another is the new Financial Services Reform Act. It requires that superannuation funds and fund managers report on the extent to which they take account of "labour standards". This provision was inserted at the instigation of the ALP.
Precisely what it is about "labour standards" that must be reported is unknown, but nevertheless it is legislation that must be complied with.
The rule of law requires that individuals (and corporations) obey the law -- no less and no more. Laws must be clear and easily understood.
Labor's union-friendly preference policy is, in principle, obnoxious -- and it can be implemented without legislation.
Nothing prevents a future ALP government from making it a term of government contracts that businesses be union-friendly. From the ACTU's perspective it would be simple and effective. The question of what is a union-friendly business would not be decided by parliament -- it would be left to bureaucrats and ministers. How companies wishing to obtain government contracts are expected to comply with such a requirement is impossible to tell.
Australian company directors often complain when they compare the attitude towards entrepreneurial activity shown in the United States to that in this country.
Obviously there are many reasons for the difference, but one of them is that in America, company boards, and individual directors personally feel a responsibility to support the political process.
In the United States, company directors are far more likely to be honest in their assessment about the effects on their business operations of either a Republican or Democratic administration.
In Australia, anyone responsible for either a small, medium, or large-scale enterprise would be hard-pressed to genuinely claim that Labor's industrial relations policy would be good for their business.
But do Australian companies put their money where their mouth is in the same way the ACTU does for the ALP?
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