Dramatic Chess Move-Queen knocked off
A sudden move in the Senate saw a big chunk of the Loophole Bill being passed. What passed and how it passed is the dawn of a 'new' capitalism for Australia.
Last week I described politics as a three dimensional chess game with multiple players all moving chess pieces at the same time. Well, just as I published this I discovered that ‘our’ Queen had just been ‘taken’ but more, blown off the chess board. (And she must be lying around somewhere but I can’t find her!) But that’s politics!
It happened this this!
I described how in the Senate (on 7 Dec) two independents, Senator David Pocock and Senator Jacqui Lambie had successfully split the Loophole (industrial relations) Bill and with the Labor Government had pushed through major chunks of the Bill. (That’s the Bill that I’ve described as ‘Destroying competition by destroying small business.
I based last week’s comments on a media release put out by Senator David Pocock (Senator for the ACT) who detailed what had been passed. This included the OHS items of the Loophole Bill and the labour hire provisions. It was common sense to pass the OHS issues and (maybe) the labour hire bits. But here’s the kicker!
Senator Pocock just happened not to mention that he also pushed through provisions for a massive escalation of union powers to enter and control any business in Australia. Staggering! I’ve never seen anything like this. On my assessment, union reps now become de facto political commissars implanted in Australian businesses, including very small businesses.
That’s the chess move sweeping ‘our’ Queen off the chess board!
Am I exaggerating? Here’s what the doyen of Australian business commentary, Robert Gottliebsen, said this week. He called the move:
• …an unprecedented attack on the more than 900,000 family businesses that employ people.
• …the biggest change in business capitalism for a generation…
He explained that:
• The legislation provides that for any family business that employs people (starting with only one person), and has in its ranks a union member, the union will have the power to declare that person a delegate.
That person will have the power to:
• …manage a set of union rules that govern the way they [the business person/s] conduct their business.
And how did this happen? Simple. The Albanese government needs two independent Senators to vote for its Loophole Bill and it passes. Gottliebsen says:
• In my view, independent senators David Pocock and Jacqui Lambie double-crossed Australia’s family businesses in allowing the attack on family business legislation to be passed suddenly on December 6 when people had been told these and other issues were part of a Senate inquiry and would be debated early next year.
• In particular Pocock, who set himself up as a true independent and an advocate for family business, turned out to be simply a Trojan horse.
I totally agree with Robert Gottliebsen. In my view, Senator Pocock has just trashed his reputation as a true independent and advocate for small business. The faith and trust I had in taking part in the consultations conducted over months with Senator Pocock have been blown apart.
Was I naïvely hopeful? Totally! I should have been alert to opinions last year that Senator Pocock was a Trojan Horse acting for the Labor Party and unions on their social and economic transformation agenda.
Let me briefly explain my take on that agenda.
The Australian Labor Treasurer, Jim Chalmers had a long article in a Left leaning magazine early this year announcing that 2023 would be the year that the Albanese government would ‘remake’ Australian capitalism. He gave no details instead expressing the agenda in a broad academic style. Frankly I couldn’t understand much of what he was on about but clearly there was lots of ‘signalling!
However what that agenda means in practice is unfolding under the banner of ‘modernising’ the Australian economy. Treasurer Chalmers provided his version of this in an article this week where he detailed ‘modernising’ as the buzz word. He says this involves Australia becoming a ‘renewable energy superpower,’ modernising supply chains, the human capital base, ‘incentivising sustainable finance’, revisiting competition settings, and on and on and on! All good stuff we are urged to believe!
The Loophole Bill has to be understood within that context.
The Bill is effectively a trashing via legislative construct of the legal underpinnings of a market economy. I jest not! This is being done at the core base of economic activity through a legislative declaration that where any individual supplies services using a commercial contract that the contract is to be treated as an employment contract.
That is, it’s the removal of the legal right of people to be self-employed. This is so because self-employed people earn their income by providing services under commercial contracts. By declaring the contracts to be ‘employment, ’self-employment is outlawed. Simple!
The way this is put into practices is through the introduction of vast powers for the institutional labour bureaucracy (the Fair Work Commission) and unions to micro manage transaction in the economy under the guise of ‘protecting’ self-employed workers. This is, I suppose, what Treasurer Chalmers refers to as ‘modernising.’
And this is the next stage of the Loophole Bill that will now almost certainly pass in February next year given what is now obvious about the Pocock Trojan Horse reality.
Effectively this ‘modernising’ is the implementation of an argument that holds that the legal ability of small business people to be self-employed needs to be destroyed to ‘protect’ them.
And a part of that ‘destroy to protect’ agenda can be seen in the Bill that passed last week.
That (now passed) section gives unions awesome authority over the decision making power of owners/managers of businesses both large and small. That is, its part of this governments agenda to centralise control of the economy through a vast bureaucratic institutional process in which unions are key players. And the control penetrates down to micro-managing transactions and decisions that self-employed will make. It sounds crazy that this should be occurring but the words in the legislation mean what they say!
For the union movement (and the Labor Party) this has a practical perspective. This is the process they believe that will turn around their collapsing union membership in the private sector, now down to 8% of the workforce.
Understand also that this is not a process where the agenda strikes like lightening. No. It’s a process that establishes institutional power to progressively implement the agenda small slice by small slice. It’s one of those things where over time people will turn around and say, ‘how did we get here, how come my income as a self-employed person has disappeared and Im now forced to be an employee?’
So to summarise the attack I describe above, is ideological, born from a view that self-employment is an illegitimate form of income earning. And there’s the practical. That is the union movement is desperate to boost its membership numbers. Self-employment needs to be destroyed as part of the campaign to boost union numbers. Pretty simple motivation to understand actually!!!
Ah the folly of humanity in the chess game of politics! Are we headed for checkmate against us self employed people. Looks damn well like it to me.
John. If only this could be achieved. But OMG, the background stories about some pollies can be hair-raising. Fortunately the vast majority of pollies Ive dealt with over many years are level headed, 'normal' people but the political environment produces strange behaviour with, too frequently the 'scary' characters often holding sway. But we have to deal with the pieces that are on the chess board and the players who are playing. There's little pick and choosing just dealing with the vagaries of the human character
The number of idiotic policy errors that have been born from deals buying off ‘independent’ senators would fill a book. As individuals, they tend to be ideological, but analytically unmoored from any relevant intellectual discipline or life experience. And they are cheap to buy off.
Voters never learn, and each crop of independents is soon replaced by the next.