Opinion: Fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work? You cannot be serious

The CFMEU has managed to turn a handful of public holidays into three weeks off the job, writes Mike O’Connor.

CFMEU workers have hacked their public holidays.

There is a high-rise construction site nearby that fell silent a few days ago, not a hard hat nor high viz vest to be seen, just the CFMEU flags flapping in the autumn breeze.

Safety issues, inclement weather, supply chain problems? None of the above. The reason all work ceased was because the CFMEU declared that its members would link the Easter public holidays with the Anzac Day holiday, fill in the gaps with the outrageous number of rostered days off they have demanded as part of their deal with developers, and walked off the job for three weeks.

An executive with one development company has told me that if it gets three days’ work in a five-day week out of its construction employees, it counts itself lucky.

Fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work? You can’t be serious. Screw the bosses for whatever you can squeeze out of them, and everyone else be damned. What about the consequence of higher costs feeding into higher apartment prices, making ownership more difficult for an increasing number of people? Not my problem, mate.

And so to the public service, the membership of which suffered collective chest pains and threatened cardiac arrest when that dreadful Peter Dutton said he’d make them climb out of their trackie daks and go back to the office.

Their ranks have swelled by 40,000 since the Albanese government was elected so you’d reckon we must be getting some red hot service for all this extra muscle.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton had grand plans for public servants. Picture: Richard Dobson/NCA NewsWire

Let’s look at a report by the joint committee of public accounts and audit which was released the day before the government announced the May 3 election date and which went largely unreported.

The committee found “plainly unacceptable’’ failings across the four departments and agencies it investigated, saying some departments were failing to effectively regulate at all or their regulation was only partially effective.

“Some of the shortcomings – particularly the Department of Home Affairs’ failure to effectively regulate migration agents and the Department of Industry, Science and Resources’ oversight of trade measurement were plainly unacceptable,” it said.

The boys and girls in Home Affairs were so averse to the concept of a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay that instead of bothering to investigate migration agents suspected of criminal activity they just waved them through and registered them without question while ignoring hundreds of complaints about dodgy operators, almost all of which were filed in the electronic trash file with only 9 per cent of complaints being investigated.

The audit found that no action was taken against 60 per cent of migration agents who were suspected of facilitating criminal enterprise or of involvement in cash-for-visa schemes.

Any heads roll because of this systemic laziness and monumental incompetence? You know the answer.

No one, however, could accuse Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade employee and First Nations People ambassador Justin Mohamed of slacking off in the boss’s time.

In his role in which he has been paid almost $1m since being appointed by the Albanese government, he has racked up around $350,000 in business-class trips to Europe, the Middle East and the US.

First Nations People ambassador Justin Mohamed

His job? To provide “strategic guidance on the development and implementation of a First Nations approach to foreign policy”. Such is the burden of this task that the government paid a private consultancy $266,000 to give him a hand. His role is the only one of its kind in the world. I wonder why.

Whatever became of the national work ethic, which powered the country’s rise in living standards to be among the highest in the world, the same standards that are now slipping through our fingers like grains of sand?

We’ve become lazy and soft, hands outstretched for the latest dollop of government charity, and the federal election campaign mirrors this malaise.

The major political parties have tapped into this, realising Australians have no interest in reforming taxation and industrial relations regimes and an education system that turns out illiterates, striving for higher productivity or meaningfully addressing the woeful state of our defence forces.

Heavens no. What we want are handouts, the government dollar clinking into our proferred tin cups.

It is sad to witness this widespread apathy toward the political process and the intellectual laziness that leads people to accept the tawdry bribes being offered without bothering to take the time to divine the true state of the country. We are a nation in decline, and that’s the truth of it.

Originally published as Opinion: Fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work? You cannot be serious