Does Scott Morrison really want to go there with the CFMMEU? Deregister a union for a deleted tweet? That makes News Corp’s holy war against Yassmin Abdel-Magied for a deleted Anzac Day post look positively restrained. A social media-based industrial relations policy, to go with “fair dinkum power” (the official new term for dispatchable power, to distinguish it from unAustralian renewable power), and the flag lapel pin to remind people of how he reminds himself he’s on voters’ side: the eccentricities of Morrison’s vision for Australia are mounting up.
The government has long attacked the CFMMEU, as it is now, over its “bullying” and “intimidation”. Former industrial relations minister Michaelia Cash even argued this deterred women from entering the construction sector, saying in 2016:
The toxic culture of bullying and intimidation caused by the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union is a huge turn-off for women wanting to enter the industry. It is hard to imagine any parent wanting their daughter to go into this industry when they are confronted with images of CFMEU bullying and intimidation.
New industrial relations minister Kelly O’Dwyer echoed her predecessor yesterday, attacking the union’s “thuggery” and “intimidation”. But problematically, within hours O’Dwyer was also talking to 7.30 and saying about her own party, “there’s no question that the Liberal Party can and should do better when it comes to getting more women into Parliament and we need to do a lot better at keeping them there when we actually get them there”. And then this about the leadership crisis:
I’ve had conversations with many members of parliament, both male and female, and it is clear to me that people were subject to threats and intimidation and bullying. But that isn’t just over the course of the last week. There are some people who have raised concerns about elements within the party organisation …
O’Dwyer went on to say she was “a little bit disgusted” by the reaction with the Liberal Party to Julia Banks’ statement announcing she was leaving politics. Reckon the Morrison government is in a strong position to go after the CFMMEU over “threats and intimidation and bullying”? Or over deterring women from participating in an industry?
Of course Morrison and O’Dwyer could always launch a royal commission into the CFMMEU. Once inclined to dismiss royal commissions as a waste of time, Morrison has now begun to realise their merits. Except, wait, we had a royal commission already and its most prominent result was nine abandoned or failed prosecutions of CFMMEU officials, including the debacle of a failed prosecution of the offending tweet author John Setka for blackmail. Or they could set up a bespoke construction industry watchdog — except the government did that already and appointed someone to head it who broke industrial relations law. Or they could set up a bespoke anti-union regulator — oh wait.
Seeing a pattern here? Every time this government goes after unions, it blows up spectacularly in its face. It dreams big — of destroying the CFMMEU, of convincing voters that Bill Shorten is a crooked union boss in the thrall of crooked union bosses, of delegitimising the “union run” industry super sector (O’Dwyer’s former role) — but the reality is courtroom humiliation and ministerial bungling.
And all for what? To rein in wild inflation in construction costs caused by a rogue union? Wages in construction in the last three years, despite the residential building boom, grew 10% slower than private sector wages. To lift disastrous productivity growth? Construction was above average in productivity growth in the last decade.
And while John Setka was publishing and deleting an idiot tweet, the CBA and NAB were being forced to admit to multiple examples of misconduct even as they participated in a financial industry reflex of denialism of criminality to the banking royal commission.
Morrison can deflect to the CFMMEU all he likes. But the bullying and intimidation is right there in his own party. And criminal conduct is on display every day of the royal commission hearings. He’s strangely unexercised about those. Maybe he should get off Twitter.
Well before we see another “Royal Commission” I want to see all the prosecutions of the most senior executives that will come from the current one into the banking sector. I know Scott Morrison voted more than 20 times not to have this Royal Commission, but we should not let him get away with taking the focus off the criminal behaviour of the sector that the general public had known was going on for more than a decade, and for those who didn’t, surely do now, don’t let him take the focus off what has been the rise and rise of corrupt practices in BIG business for over 20 years now. Do remember he works for us, just saying!
I’ve been a Unionist for 35 years and I honestly crave the day that someone, maybe from the ACTU or the ALP, comes out and condemns Setka for the dickhead he is.
The CFMMEU is better than Setka and those members deserve better. That he continues to be elected by the members and through this continues to make himself, his Union and the ALP an easy target for the Tories is one of life’s great mysteries.
I don’t think he did anything that really means anything. If ScoMo can bring a lump of coal into Parliament, surely Setka’s kids can hold up a sign telling some people to f##k off. Seriously? If I were him I wouldn’t even have deleted the tweet. The fact that he did delete it shows that he is sensitive to what it might do to the Union’s image.
All the RC into Unions found was pretty much zilch but these drongos in the coalition keep repeating all the slurs about thuggish behaviour, in the hope that some gullible voters will swallow them. All out of the Goebbels playbook. I also saw some esteemed journalist repeating them on the ABC’s Drum and no one called him out on it. Most of the MSM is a disgrace, and the disease is spreading to the ABC because of the continued attacks by the govt. and its cheerleaders in the “free” press.
Yeah! Get rid of the one cringey guy and you will stop the libs from trying to bust union power! Intelligent discussion in the Crikey comments section.
It would certainly remove an element of legitimacy that Setka gives the Tories, which is all I was suggesting.
Intelligent replies to comments in the crikey comments section.
Mostly Morrison is just proving he has no real ideas, no real political judgment, and just the same tired scare-lines.
Threatening a union because he didn’t like a Tweet, and going back to the same tired union-bashing well.
It paired really well with his shocking midjudgments in talking about the banking royal commission which he still obviously thinks is a waste of time and only there as a sop to “populist whingers” to “process their pain”.
Other than the double-dissolution aided anti-union bills, which have done nothing for them but embarass Michaelia Cash, the Coalition has achieved basically zero percent of the agenda which Abbott and then Turnbull ran. They’ve dithered a great deal, abandoned most things, occasionally been forced into implementing Labor policy (banking royal commission, income tax cuts, raised education funding which let’s remember they were going to slash before understanding that “implementing the full Gonski” after ll was their only way out of that hole) without the unacceptable Coalition parts (big business tax cuts, raised pension age). It’s time we had a Labor government to implement Labor policy, including the bits the Coalition has just punted off into the too hard basket like climate change policy and higher education funding.
Maybe Morrison is bereft of any real concept of IR reform as was Abbott, or as paralysed as Turnbull. Maybe he is in the thrall of the ideologues who bleat rather than think, leading to knee-jerk populist platitudes and the partisan idiocy that leads to a ‘kill bill’ strategy despite repeated experience that it is not successful. And even if they could and did ‘kill bill’ is an alternative better politics?
Bill probably doesn’t deserve the good luck he’s had, but he remains slightly toxic and a better opposition for Morrison to face than any of the alternatives.
Or maybe he IS one of the ideologues who bleat rather than think…
That’s my suspicion, after looking at the man’s political history, including how he’s voted.
Same old same old. I’ve been hearing the same mantra since the 70s. Unions Bad! Labor destroyers! Liberals saviours. Liberals best economic managers. LOL