Last Sunday Cardinal Pell dropped another very large pebble into Canberra’s political pond. He expressed concern that the new industrial relations regime would put downward pressure on minimum wages. The ripples could still be seen the next day in the flurry of questions in Parliament.
It follows his speech to the National Press Club before the Work Choices Bill passed the Parliament. There he had no praise for the changes, and expressed some apprehension about them. He emphasised the need to protect those on low incomes and called for a slight increase in the minimum wage. He stated that he would welcome a modest increase in union influence.
This might sound radical for a commentator on public life more usually associated with a more conservative perspective. But widespread Catholic concern over these reforms should come as no surprise. From its conception the Australian approach to industrial relations has been a brew in which Catholic social thought forms a key ingredient, especially the ideas propounded by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum.
Now that the changes are law, the Government has to deal with a Catholic Church that has been seriously rebuffed. The Government’s welfare changes, to which the Senate amendments were very modest, have also annoyed the Church.
But the Government also failed to win over the economists. Speaking recently at the Economists Conference, Mark Wooden, of the Melbourne Institute, doubted that the proposed changes would reduce unemployment. In the continuing opposition to the laws might God and mammon form a rare alliance?
The Government has tried to bridge the divide by appointing Ian Harper to the proposed Australian Fair Pay Commission. He is a formidable economist and a committed churchman. What better political bandage to cover the ungainly sore that church figures have bared on the new arm of the Government’s economic reform!
But the sore goes much deeper than Government believes. The Catholic Church’s apprehension about the IR changes does not simply express ecclesiastical zeal directed to political purposes. The tradition of thought and reflection at stake here is not only deeply entrenched not just in the Catholic Church, but is also incarnated into the values and institutions with which Australia has come to feel comfortable.
Harper may be able to appeal to some religious ideas in order to support his economics. But the key point made by the Catholic Church is that the priority of