Not just the building industry needs to be cleaned up

Eric Abetz is becoming an interesting Employment Minister: he has followed up last week’s “Thirty Years War” speech by clearly laying the problems at SPC Ardmona at the company’s feet, for agreeing to over-generous pay and conditions.

On the ABC’s Insiders program yesterday, Abetz said: “the enterprise agreement … was decided or determined in March 2013 – less than 12 months ago. These conditions were all agreed to by management, and you've got to say, well, that was not the right decision to make.”

In his speech to the Sydney Institute last Tuesday, the minister likened what’s been going on in industrial relations since 1983 to the Thirty Years War in Europe after Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses to the door of the Church in Wittenberg in 1517.

The equivalent of Luther’s action, which started the Reformation, was Gerard Henderson’s essay in Quadrant in 1983, which coined the phrase “The Industrial Relations Club”. In his thesis, both sides were to blame.

The analogy doesn’t quite hold up because of the reforms, praised and supported by Abetz, that were carried out under the series of Accords between the government and the Australian Council of Trade Unions: “Despite the flaws of the Accord approach, we should acknowledge that there were grown-ups in charge of both the Labor Party and the union movement who were not oblivious to the broader national interest.”

Then, in 2004, the Howard government made the mistake of “exceeding its electoral mandate” with WorkChoices, after which the pendulum swung back following the 2007 electoral victory by the union-funded ALP, with Julia Gillard eventually playing the role of “Santa Claus”.

Eric Abetz doesn’t spell this out, but it was probably a 17-year war, not 30, beginning with the Coalition’s victory in 1996 and the waterfront dispute that started almost immediately.

Abetz is now talking about a new “Peace of Westphalia”:

“If we are to achieve a lasting peace settlement after our Thirty Years War, such a settlement has to be predicated on moving away from the dichotomy of two innately hostile sides within the Club, forever doing expedient deals to temporarily ameliorate the hostility.

"Employers and unions must be encouraged to take responsibility for the cost of their deals, not just the cost to the affected enterprises, but the overall cost in relation to our economic efficiency and the creation of opportunities for others.”

Not many employers conveniently ask the government for money like the Coca-Cola Amatil subsidiary, SPC Ardmonda, so they can be knocked back for having done “expedient deals”.

Most of the time it’s just some CEO faced with either having his or her own war against a union, or caving in to a demand that will probably just make life difficult for the next CEO.

Eric Abetz now wants to reinstate the Australian Building and Construction Commission, which effectively kept the construction unions under control between 2005 and 2012, when it was abolished by Julia Gillard and Bill Shorten.

The recent revelations of corruption in the building industry will make that easier to do, but the deals that have been agreed to in the food and automotive industries demonstrate that the problems go much wider than that (Abbott's 'Costello moment', February 3).

We need something like the ABCC across all industry, with the power to take civil action against unions and to take action against employers as well.

Maybe the manufacturing unions are not quite as frightful as the building unions, but as SPC Ardmona and General Motors Holden have shown, the results can be the same.