Labor up for IR fight, so Coalition must focus on ETS

FAIR Work has its problems, but the ALP is most uncomfortable with the climate change debate.

THE Labor Party is likely to face increasingly awkward questions from the media in the coming months about the inflexibility of its new Fair Work Act (now that it has come into operation as of January 1), but the opposition is unlikely to win any votes by also focusing attention on such failures.

It is hard to imagine the Prime Minister is anything but happy when Tony Abbott stops asking questions about the emissions trading scheme to ask a question about workplace relations.

Labor swept into office on the back of resentment over John Howard's Work Choices legislation. The final incarnation of the policy was nothing like the original version put to the parliament -- for example, the no-disadvantage test did an enormous amount to protect workers' rights -- but the politics of industrial relations have turned the policy area into one that the Coalition should not now campaign on.

That doesn't mean it won't read with interest stories in the media vilifying failures in Julia Gillard's new system, or put up an alternative policy that returns greater flexibility to the system (explaining that system in detail to the key interest groups that need to know). But now that the Coalition is on a winner on the matter of the government's ETS, it should not make the mistake of taking attention away from those failures by diverting the public debate to IR.

This will be a hard path for the new Opposition Leader to tread. As a former workplace relations minister in the Howard government, Abbott is a strong ideological supporter of flexible working conditions and the policy levers that reduce union power.

Compared with Malcolm Turnbull, who was happy to give his industrial relations spokesman, Michael Keenan, a script of staying out of the public eye, Abbott has put one of his most trusted factional supporters, Eric Abetz, into the role.

Abetz is not one to shy away from a political fight. He was the minister in the Howard government who tried to ram through changes to donations laws that would shield Liberal donors (as part of an all-inclusive shield) to help the party campaign against a Labor Party heavily funded by the union movement. He was also the senator deployed to cross-examine Godwin Grech over the Oz Car affair.

He is now happy to take the fight up to the new government on the IR front.

Abetz has set up a website calling for small businesses to provide examples of how the new laws have adversely affected them.

On that same site, he has already posted a large number of press releases detailing problems with Gillard's legislation. While Abetz is doing what any hardworking shadow minister should be doing, I am not sure the IR debate is one the Liberal Party can win, at least not in the short term.

The Labor Party would be delighted every time the policy debate at the national level moves away from the ETS. While the business community might find Labor's IR laws difficult to operate under, and believe they should therefore be exposed as such by the opposition, the wider public is still fearful of Work Choices-style policies returning if the Coalition returns to power.

Industrial relations is one of those policy scripts that appeals to the Liberal Party base (small business). It is also one that can unite the Coalition parties because farmers, like business people, want flexibility in the workforce to help them with matters such as managing seasonal labour.

After the 2007 election defeat it was a blow to the Liberal base when party strategists ran from the IR debate and didn't prevent elements of Labor's new legislation coming into effect. Had Abbott been leader, he probably would have.

After the disastrous attempt by Turnbull to verbal his party into backing the government's ETS, the timing might have been right late last year to draw attention to IR as a way of keeping the membership on side. As one Liberal described it to me, "giving the members some red meat" on the IR front might have meant they would have given the leadership group greater freedom to negotiate on climate change policy.

That time has now passed, and the Liberal base is getting what it wants on climate change now anyway.

In politics, one of the key considerations when looking at a media strategy is to consider what the other side of politics would be most uncomfortable about you focusing on. Clearly, Labor has become uncomfortable with the direction of the climate change debate, in particular its ETS policy. In contrast, it is always up for the argument when the debate moves to industrial relations.

The Fair Work Act has its problems, which are likely to become more obvious the longer it is in operation. But in the short term, and so soon after losing an election on the issue of industrial relations, the Coalition would be better off focusing its attention elsewhere.