One of Albrechtsens better efforts on this. What I love about Howard bashing unions is the way Fairfax and the ABC always conveniently forget what great ALP leaders like Hawke and Chifley did wrt respect to union trouble
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com...alian/comments/blue_collar_pantomime_artists/
DON’T be fooled by the pantomime being played out over the Australian Building and Construction Commission. Kevin Rudd and his Government and, more particularly, the unholy alliance of unions, academics and agitators demanding that the Labor Government kill off the ABCC now rather than in 2010, all realise this is play-acting. For the Prime Minister to renege on his unambiguous election promise to preserve the ABCC until 2010 would not only leave him stripped of any moral credibility, it would also expose him as a gormless pawn of his paymasters in the unions. All parties know it won’t happen.
The real aim during the next few months is to ensure the Rudd Government will neuter the ABCC’s successor when it gets around to setting up a new body to regulate the construction industry. A big-budget advertising blitz is under way, coinciding with special pleading by Labor friend and academic George Williams and Labor MP Gavin Marshall’s caucus resolution to disband the ABCC. Each mini-drama is aimed at whipping up an atmosphere of emotional hysteria. While they dream of the immediate emasculation of the ABCC, construction unions will be satisfied if, in 2010, they are back in the driver’s seat of an unregulated industry characterised by lawlessness and intimidation.
No one should forget the long, bloody history of attempts to regulate this industry and its thuggish unions. Governments of both colours, at state and federal levels, tried for decades without success to end crime and intimidation on building sites. In 1986, corruption and violence in the Builders Labourers Federation had grown so outrageous that Bob Hawke, with the full support of Victorian premier John Cain, permanently deregistered the union. The 1992 Gyles royal commission in NSW uncovered rampant illegality.
Then, in 2003, the Cole royal commission - which recommended the establishment of the ABCC - released 23 volumes detailing hundreds of episodes of unlawful conduct, intimidation and inappropriate payments to union officials within the construction industry across Australia. The Victorian government was described as tacitly accepting union dominance. Urgent reform and a cultural change were required, it said. More than 200 recommendations were tabled.
After the years of failure, real reform arrived. The ABCC has been a spectacular success. One measure of that success is the money and energy that union leaders such as Sharan Burrow, John Sutton, Kevin Reynolds and Dean Mighell and co are pouring into their attempts to neuter it. But there are other measures. In its 2007 report, updated in 2008, respected economic analyst Econtech found that the establishment of the ABCC led to a dramatic improvement in industry productivity with significant benefits for the national economy. Without the ABCC, gross domestic product would have been 1.5 per cent lower and the consumer price index would have been 1.2 per cent higher. Overall, Econtech found an annual economic welfare gain of $5.1billion from the ABCC.
Not only did it lead to more affordable housing and lower prices for Rudd’s working families, the ABCC ended years of “no ticket, no start” intimidation, standover tactics and industrial blackmail.
Yes, the ABCC does have strong compliance and investigative powers, but remember the context. The Cole commission’s documented history of intimidation suggests that polite requests for information from union officials are not going to get you very far.
The ABCC’s powers are neither unusual nor unwarranted despite the bogus and emotive claims of unions and their boosters on Labor’s back bench and in academe. We have had tear-jerking assertions that the ABCC’s powers are unprecedented breaches of human rights exercised by a star chamber. The Construction, Forestry, Mining, Energy Union’s Dave Noonan summed it up thus: “No other workers in this country, apart from workers in the construction industry, are faced with this sort of heavy-handed and undemocratic assault on human rights.”
Heart-rending stuff. Also completely false. Those working in the finance industry - to name but one group - are subjected to equally strict provisions. Part three of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission Act allows ASIC to hold examinations on oath, in secret, of anyone who has information relevant to an ASIC investigation, whether or not they are suspected of illegality. The act deprives examinees of the privilege against self-incrimination and overrides legal professional privilege. A person who refuses to comply with ASIC’s requirements can be jailed for two years.
Why aren’t Dave and his mates crying about the human rights of those regulated by ASIC? Are white-collar types a lower class of being not worthy of human rights? And why have Dave and co been so untroubled about the regular use for decades of the coercive investigative powers found in the tax legislation, the Trade Practices Act, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority Act and numerous other acts? In truth, heartstring-tugging claims that ABCC is infringing the human rights of construction workers is union hocus pocus. It’s pure trickery.
Act II, scene II: Enter a poignant martyr for the union cause. CFMEU official Noel Washington, who has refused to give evidence against his union mates, is part of a deliberately concocted union agenda to dismantle the ABCC. But as unions hype his prosecution by the ABCC as an unprecedented attack against an innocent bystander, remember that if Washington replaced his blue overalls for a white shirt and a bank job, he would find himself subjected to similar powers that ASIC has been using for years against those in the finance industry.
Remember also there are good reasons for investing the ABCC with power to compel witnesses to give evidence. Union intimidation against those who dob means that witnesses often prefer to be compelled to give evidence rather than be seen to be co-operating. Remember also that witnesses who give evidence are immune from prosecution. The ABCC is gathering evidence to prosecute others alleged to have committed breaches.
That is why this union pantomime will turn into a full operatic performance. But if Rudd and his deputy Julia Gillard are serious about tackling the teachers unions to demonstrate the Government is governing in the national interest rather than according to union diktat, they need to do precisely the same in the construction industry. Governing in the national interest means taking on the building unions, exposing their campaign of trickery and staring down union attempts to unwind reforms in the construction industry.
If thuggish building unions succeed in getting rid of the ABCC - and any effective future building industry regulator set up by the Rudd Government - why shouldn’t people in the finance industry start lobbying to get rid of ASIC, and succeed? The latter is a ridiculous scenario, of course. And that is precisely why the union agenda against the ABCC deserves to be exposed as equally fatuous and self-serving. Over to you, Mr Rudd.
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com...alian/comments/blue_collar_pantomime_artists/
DON’T be fooled by the pantomime being played out over the Australian Building and Construction Commission. Kevin Rudd and his Government and, more particularly, the unholy alliance of unions, academics and agitators demanding that the Labor Government kill off the ABCC now rather than in 2010, all realise this is play-acting. For the Prime Minister to renege on his unambiguous election promise to preserve the ABCC until 2010 would not only leave him stripped of any moral credibility, it would also expose him as a gormless pawn of his paymasters in the unions. All parties know it won’t happen.
The real aim during the next few months is to ensure the Rudd Government will neuter the ABCC’s successor when it gets around to setting up a new body to regulate the construction industry. A big-budget advertising blitz is under way, coinciding with special pleading by Labor friend and academic George Williams and Labor MP Gavin Marshall’s caucus resolution to disband the ABCC. Each mini-drama is aimed at whipping up an atmosphere of emotional hysteria. While they dream of the immediate emasculation of the ABCC, construction unions will be satisfied if, in 2010, they are back in the driver’s seat of an unregulated industry characterised by lawlessness and intimidation.
No one should forget the long, bloody history of attempts to regulate this industry and its thuggish unions. Governments of both colours, at state and federal levels, tried for decades without success to end crime and intimidation on building sites. In 1986, corruption and violence in the Builders Labourers Federation had grown so outrageous that Bob Hawke, with the full support of Victorian premier John Cain, permanently deregistered the union. The 1992 Gyles royal commission in NSW uncovered rampant illegality.
Then, in 2003, the Cole royal commission - which recommended the establishment of the ABCC - released 23 volumes detailing hundreds of episodes of unlawful conduct, intimidation and inappropriate payments to union officials within the construction industry across Australia. The Victorian government was described as tacitly accepting union dominance. Urgent reform and a cultural change were required, it said. More than 200 recommendations were tabled.
After the years of failure, real reform arrived. The ABCC has been a spectacular success. One measure of that success is the money and energy that union leaders such as Sharan Burrow, John Sutton, Kevin Reynolds and Dean Mighell and co are pouring into their attempts to neuter it. But there are other measures. In its 2007 report, updated in 2008, respected economic analyst Econtech found that the establishment of the ABCC led to a dramatic improvement in industry productivity with significant benefits for the national economy. Without the ABCC, gross domestic product would have been 1.5 per cent lower and the consumer price index would have been 1.2 per cent higher. Overall, Econtech found an annual economic welfare gain of $5.1billion from the ABCC.
Not only did it lead to more affordable housing and lower prices for Rudd’s working families, the ABCC ended years of “no ticket, no start” intimidation, standover tactics and industrial blackmail.
Yes, the ABCC does have strong compliance and investigative powers, but remember the context. The Cole commission’s documented history of intimidation suggests that polite requests for information from union officials are not going to get you very far.
The ABCC’s powers are neither unusual nor unwarranted despite the bogus and emotive claims of unions and their boosters on Labor’s back bench and in academe. We have had tear-jerking assertions that the ABCC’s powers are unprecedented breaches of human rights exercised by a star chamber. The Construction, Forestry, Mining, Energy Union’s Dave Noonan summed it up thus: “No other workers in this country, apart from workers in the construction industry, are faced with this sort of heavy-handed and undemocratic assault on human rights.”
Heart-rending stuff. Also completely false. Those working in the finance industry - to name but one group - are subjected to equally strict provisions. Part three of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission Act allows ASIC to hold examinations on oath, in secret, of anyone who has information relevant to an ASIC investigation, whether or not they are suspected of illegality. The act deprives examinees of the privilege against self-incrimination and overrides legal professional privilege. A person who refuses to comply with ASIC’s requirements can be jailed for two years.
Why aren’t Dave and his mates crying about the human rights of those regulated by ASIC? Are white-collar types a lower class of being not worthy of human rights? And why have Dave and co been so untroubled about the regular use for decades of the coercive investigative powers found in the tax legislation, the Trade Practices Act, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority Act and numerous other acts? In truth, heartstring-tugging claims that ABCC is infringing the human rights of construction workers is union hocus pocus. It’s pure trickery.
Act II, scene II: Enter a poignant martyr for the union cause. CFMEU official Noel Washington, who has refused to give evidence against his union mates, is part of a deliberately concocted union agenda to dismantle the ABCC. But as unions hype his prosecution by the ABCC as an unprecedented attack against an innocent bystander, remember that if Washington replaced his blue overalls for a white shirt and a bank job, he would find himself subjected to similar powers that ASIC has been using for years against those in the finance industry.
Remember also there are good reasons for investing the ABCC with power to compel witnesses to give evidence. Union intimidation against those who dob means that witnesses often prefer to be compelled to give evidence rather than be seen to be co-operating. Remember also that witnesses who give evidence are immune from prosecution. The ABCC is gathering evidence to prosecute others alleged to have committed breaches.
That is why this union pantomime will turn into a full operatic performance. But if Rudd and his deputy Julia Gillard are serious about tackling the teachers unions to demonstrate the Government is governing in the national interest rather than according to union diktat, they need to do precisely the same in the construction industry. Governing in the national interest means taking on the building unions, exposing their campaign of trickery and staring down union attempts to unwind reforms in the construction industry.
If thuggish building unions succeed in getting rid of the ABCC - and any effective future building industry regulator set up by the Rudd Government - why shouldn’t people in the finance industry start lobbying to get rid of ASIC, and succeed? The latter is a ridiculous scenario, of course. And that is precisely why the union agenda against the ABCC deserves to be exposed as equally fatuous and self-serving. Over to you, Mr Rudd.
