In 2007, as a desperate Howard Government tried to fend off the resurgent Labor Opposition under Kevin Rudd, it (and its allies in big business) resorted to the time-honoured tactic of union bashing.
One particularly memorable ad featured three heavy-set blokes in industrial gear storming into a workplace populated by clean-cut, immaculately attired professional types, before the screen went dark.
A dire warning of what would befall genteel, defenceless businesses if the thugs from the union movement ever got their hands on them.
Fast forward to 2016, and if the Turnbull Government aren't quite at the same game, they're certainly playing a variation of it. Enter the now notorious 'fake tradie' election ad with its claim that Australians should 'stick with the current mob' or else risk a disastrous 'war on business'.
This isn't quite the union bashing we've seen in the past. Arguably, that's because the entire term of the Abbott-Turnbull government has been a prolonged war against trade unionism.
The contentious Dyson Royal Commission, while turning up significant examples of corruption within the union movement, also singularly failed to apply the lesson of history provided by the Costigan Royal Commission: that corruption within the union movement does not operate in a vacuum, and occurs both in parallel with, and as a reflection of, corruption within the business community.
Unlike the Costigan Commission, however, the Dyson Commission didn't turned up any 'bottom of the harbour' scandals with which to vex the business world — precisely because its terms of reference didn't allow it to go there.
Nor has the Abbott-Turnbull government allowed the lesson of history to get in the way of a convenient Labor/union-bashing electoral narrative.
"The 'fake tradie' ad is part of a wider political narrative that seeks to dismiss any argument for the redistribution of wealth as 'class warfare'."
Indeed, the 'war on business' warned against in the 'fake tradie' ad is a subtle variation on the 'union thugs' alarmism seen in 2007. In it, a 'tradie' worries about Labor's 'war' against banks, miners, and people owning investment properties, and concludes from this that it will ultimately result in a 'war on business' that will cost ordinary people their jobs. One can almost envision the Liberal Party campaign strategists taking Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous condemnation of political apathy and rendering it thus:
First, they came for the banks, but I did not speak out because I was not a banker.Then they came for the miners, but