Piers Akerman: Labor con tricks can’t hide the good, bad and the ugly

There haven’t been so many union-badged thugs swaggering through the parliamentary corridors since ACTU protesters ran riot through the capital building in 1996, writes Piers Akerman.

The lustre has left Anthony Albanese’s promised policy pearls.

His much-promised $275 electricity bonus has been smashed by soaring power costs, his teary plea for an Aboriginal-only body to inform and influence the government on all issues, including foreign affairs, is being questioned by Australians of every hue who don’t want race embedded in the Constitution and his September jobs and skills summit looks like no more than a celebration of the shrinking trade union movement’s ownership of the Labor/Green/teal government.

Union thugs like those who run the powerful Construction Forestry Maritime Mining And Energy Union (CFMMEU) own this government as evidenced by the speed with which Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations Tony Burke moved to abolish the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC).

Planes to Canberra are packed with union heavies flying in to inspect their property and issue riding instructions to the newish government, and why shouldn’t they exercise that proprietary interest - in the 2020 financial year alone, the Labor Party received over $1.2 million in support from the CFMMEU.

One CFMMEU official has said: “What we’re actually going to do is take ownership…and responsibility of the ALP. We’re going to get influence… We’re not going to wait for the politicians….we’re not going to just ask them to do it, we’re going to go in and demand they do it.”

The Albanese government is owned by CFMMEU heavyweights, writes Piers Akerman. Picture: Madura McCormack

There haven’t been so many union-badged thugs swaggering through the parliamentary corridors since ACTU protesters ran riot through the capital building in 1996, smashing fittings in the lobby and forecourt, looting the tourist shop, and injuring more than 90 personnel.

Albanese (who ducked off on holiday having served fewer than 50 days in office) imagines himself as the new Bob Hawke with his hubristic Treasurer Jim Chalmers as the latter day Paul Keating in attempting to replicate the successful 1983 Accord reached between government, business and the ACTU shortly after the Hawke government was elected.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: Gary Ramage

But Albo is no Hawke, Chalmers is not half as smart as Keating once was and ACTU secretary Sally McManus is no Bill Kelty, a realist who realised the need to rein in rogue unions. Far from it, if her immature demands of the September summit are to be believed.

McManus last week released a list of proposals that read like a thought bubble from an inner-urban Eureka Youth League manifesto and included placing the now independent Reserve Bank firmly under central government control. Perhaps comrades from the former Soviet Union or Mao’s Chinese Communist Party could inform her how such centralised economic controls were responsible for the deaths of millions.

A great example of the lunacy of the Left’s guiding philosophy – fine in principle, lousy in practise.

The abolition of the ABCC should have had big business up in arms but apart from the Master Builders Association, the forthcoming attack on the core building industry has been lost in a blizzard of virtue signalling about diversity and other gender issues which add nothing to national productivity.

Which might seem worthy were it not for the fact that the CFMMEU has a disgusting record of attacks on women in the building industry, something the woke folk will ignore when they sit beside that union’s bosses in Canberra next month.

The discredited former Labor PM Kevin Rudd set the template for post-Hawke gabfests with his ill-fated 2020 summit in April, 2008.

The more than 1000 invitation-only worthies sat around as they were lectured to by virtuous souls on the need for a republic constitutional reform and a Bill or Rights.

The overwhelming majority found that watching Rudd scribble on unending reels of butchers’ paper less than edifying and whilst 138 recommendations were put forward by the group leaders, 135 were rejected when a final report was released in 2010.

But no amount of paper will conceal the con trick Albanese, Bowen and Burke will attempt to pull off when the self-anointed good, the seriously bad and obviously ugly head to Canberra next month.

Their union masters have already written the script and the attendees are just bit players in what is shaping up to be an orgy of appeasement.