How to avoid being conned by lobby groups using you to pressure the government

The obvious question arising from big business’s onslaught against Anthony Albanese and his government is: do Australia’s voters know which sides their bread is buttered on? Sorry, boss, I think they usually do.

Last week the (Big) Business Council let fly against Albanese & Co. with both barrels. According to its chief executive, rather than feeling confident in our growing national prosperity, many of the big-business chief executives who make up the council’s membership “feel we are losing our way”.

Business Council of Australia chief Bran Black (right) told Anthony Albanese corporate leaders think the country was taking steps backwards in areas such as industrial relations and tax. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen, Bloomberg

“Instead of taking big steps on the things that matter, we are taking incremental – but noticeable – steps backwards. We have let the balance shift too far away from encouraging Australians to grow, hire, innovate and be more competitive on the world stage,” he said.

What were the big steps Albanese was failing to take? Reducing red tape, making workplace laws more flexible, making planning systems simpler and the tax system more efficient.

But “abolishing multi-employer bargaining must be seen as a priority,” he said.

This fits with the equally vehement criticism from the Mining Council the previous week, which claimed Albanese’s “reckless” industrial relations laws were already bringing conflict “to every workplace in every industry”.

Ah. So that’s what’s biting big business. But the criticism doesn’t stop there. As the business press revealed, even former trade union leader Bill Kelty – who was virtually a member of the Hawke-Keating government’s cabinet – was highly critical.

The Albanese government “seems to have lost its way” and was “mired in mediocrity”, Kelty is reported to have said to a private business gathering. “We need a Labor Party agenda in which the big issues are confronted.”

What the business press didn’t seem to know is that Kelty’s “big issues” are hardly likely to have much in common with big business’s big issues. And I very much doubt that Albanese’s industrial relations changes would have been among them.

There are plenty of good reasons for being disappointed with this government’s performance. Also last week, former Labor heavy Gareth Evans has accused the Albanese government of political timidity, condemning its instinct to “move into cautious, defensive, wedge-avoiding mode”.

Former Labor minister Gareth Evans.

Evans said in a speech: “One can’t avoid the impression that more and more people are asking: what exactly is this Labor government for?”

Just so. Now that’s a criticism many of us could share, without bearing the government any ill-will and, unlike the business lobby groups, without our disappointment concealing some purely self-interested barrow we’re pushing.

I think it’s past time voters were told more about the major role the many lobby groups play in federal politics. It’s as though lobbying has become Canberra’s second-biggest industry.

The business, employer and industry lobby groups engage in three main activities. First, they lobby the government, top bureaucrats and key senators in private, without any of us noticing. They press for policy changes that would make it easier for their businesses to increase their profits, and press against policy changes that would make it harder for their businesses to increase profits.

After just about every proposal to change a government policy, Treasury or some other department opens a “consultation”, inviting interested parties to say (in private) what they think about the merits and practicality of the proposed changes.

This is when the Canberra-based lobby groups, and private firms of lobbyists (many of them former politicians or ministerial staffers from the party that happens to be in power) swing into action. Responding to these offers of private consultation with the bureaucracy is the main way they earn their living.

Their objective is always to persuade the bureaucrats to persuade the government to tone down the change, making it less restrictive and costly to the businesses they’re representing. Often their argument will be that it’s a nice idea but, unfortunately, hugely impractical. Would cost them millions to comply.

A second role of the lobby groups is to respond publicly to changes their clients don’t like with exaggerated claims about the death and destruction the changes will cause. Just about any increase in the minimum wage will lead to thousands of Australians losing their jobs, we’re told. The latest changes to industrial relations rules will “bring conflict to every workplace in every industry”.

They exaggerate to ensure their press releases are picked up by the media. Their purpose is partly to put pressure on the government (or the Fair Work Commission), but mainly to use the media to send a signal back to their fee-paying member businesses around the country: “Don’t worry, you’re getting good value for having us here in Canberra fighting tirelessly to protect your interests against the wicked government.”

The lobby groups’ third role is the one we saw last week. Once all your private lobbying has failed to deter the government from doing something your clients really hate, take the fight public.

You try to pressure the government via the voters, by cooking up an argument that the people who’ll suffer most from the changes you don’t like aren’t the shareholders and bosses of the businesses you represent, but the country’s ordinary workers and consumers.

“We’ll be forced to pass all the new tax on to our customers. So we’ll be right, but we’re really worried about what the government’s doing to our poor customers.” (In which case, why are you fighting the tax so hard?)

As for all the industrial relations changes designed to reduce the insecurity of so many workers and to give workers in smaller businesses the ability to gain some bargaining power by uniting with workers in other businesses, this won’t improve workers’ job security, pay or conditions, but will stifle investment and productivity, make Australian businesses less competitive against the sweat shops of Asia, and cause many people to be unemployed, we’re told.

Some of these arguments contain a grain of truth, but they’re attempts to use concocted, pseudo-economic arguments to con ordinary voters into believing their interests coincide with the interests of big business, and so get them to pressure the government to stop doing things that business objects to.

A big part of this con involves the use of code words that sound more innocuous than they are. “Flexible” means flexibility for the boss, but inflexibility for the worker. “Reform” means a change that benefits business at someone else’s expense. “Populism” means a change that benefits many ordinary people at business’s expense.

“Red tape” should mean excessive form-filling that serves no useful purpose. In the mouths of big-business people, however, it means laws and regulations that limit their freedom to build new mines and other projects in places that would do great damage to the natural environment.

The Albanese government’s timidity in all but industrial relations is disappointing, but I doubt it’s so hopeless it fails to ensure voters know that what big business wants for itself is contrary to their interests.

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