Red Rag

After Labor criticised the Government’s $55 million propaganda splurge, John Howard accused Labor of being wrong. But the figure came from DEWR during a Senate Estimates hearing, and a senior Government Minister says, “That figure would be as accurate as you can get.” Getting into the spirit of Melbourne Cup day, Labor’s Stephen Smith told parliament the propaganda spending is “the purse for the Melbourne Cup until 2015 and more than the cost of the new Flemington grandstand.”

But if you thought the propaganda was going to end now, you’d be wrong. The Australian reports that “[f]urther spending is expected in a GST-style campaign to sell the changes to business and to educate employers on how to make use of them.” (My emphasis.) The Government will also increase spending on regulatory bodies — a significant chunk of the new money will go to the Office of the Employment Advocate, whose mission is not to respect people’s workplace choices, but to aggressively promote AWAs.

Despite the fact that the WorkChoices legislation will run to over 700 pages, MPs will have just 24 hours to study the bill before debate begins. Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington argue that Howard’s disdain for the parliament shows he no longer governs “for all of us”. Now that the Government controls the Senate, it has abandoned the public in order “to answer to the ideological and financial supporters of its own party”.

It was widely predicted that concessions would be made to allay public concern about WorkChoices — but that’s not what happened: the Government has instead caved to business demands, and will further erode workers’ rights. Greenfields agreements currently run for up to three years, which the ILO says is too long. WorkChoices was going to fix that by reducing the time limit to one year. But after intense lobbying by big business, workers will be denied the right to collective bargaining for up to five years — longer than the life of many projects. The new time limit will not apply to the new Employer Greenfields Agreements, in which an employer makes an agreement with itself, and binds employees who had no say in its terms (pdf), but the Fin Review (2/11, p4) says “the government might amend the bill later to extend the period.”