In the Rudd Government's attempt to 'sell' the Fair Work Bill currently before the parliament, ministers have relied on an appeal to a middle ground. Employers haven't got everything they wanted, we are told, and neither have the unions. So the Bill must be about right ... right?
Were we to judge a piece of legislation as if it were a pendulum, which is what several Rudd ministers seem to want us to do, we would first point out that the Howard legislation was extremely unbalanced; prohibiting employers and employees from including specified matters in enterprise agreements, fining individuals or unions for asking for prohibited content, making industrial action by employees almost impossible to carry out (while allowing employers to engage in industrial action with relative ease), ceasing the conditions of an enterprise agreement once it had nominally expired.
Using WorkChoices as any point of comparison defies commonsense understanding of the pendulum metaphor. The jig of 'striking a balance' was up three years ago when Barnaby Joyce said he could support the passage of WorkChoices because he had been assured that public holidays would be retained!
A much less vacuous way to argue is to debate proposals on their intrinsic, intellectual merit, rather than whether they strike a balance between, say, Margaret Thatcher and Genghis Khan.
What was particularly concerning during 2007 was that the parliamentary Labor Party, secure on a wave of vociferous community opposition to the Howard Government's industrial relations laws, consciously pulled down the public's expectations by focusing disproportionately on AWAs and the most visibly extreme of the laws.
It is a measure of the extremism of where we have been — and, sadly, where we largely remain — that Greg Combet last Wednesday boasted that the new legislation would ensure that each employee could choose to be a member of a union.
It is precisely because the Labor Party, aided and abetted by the mainstream media, zeroed in on the absurd and outrageous features of Howard's legislation that the more submerged and dangerous aspects of the laws went largely unremarked. As we debate the new Bill, the challenge is to flush out its neoliberal presuppositions.
One of these precepts is that, in exercising their right to take industrial action, workers should be obliged to undergo a secret ballot. It seems difficult to be opposed in principle to a secret ballot, given the historical association with democratic