Albanese team must return to promise of transparency
Anthony Albanese has shown an unexpected capacity for international diplomacy, accepting the potential benefits of direct engagement with Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping while supporting the bigger shared concerns of our regional partners over the South China Sea. Unfortunately, the same level of good management and wide engagement is sorely missing at home. Across a raft of issues the Albanese government has failed to consult properly or explain what it is doing. The reality is a long way from the promises made during the federal election campaign last year that Labor would be a process-driven team able to take considered action.
The Qantas debacle that has dominated question time in federal parliament during the past week is symptomatic of a bigger problem. Transport Minister Catherine King has tied herself in knots to avoid giving straight answers on why the decision was made to prevent Qatar Airways from expanding the number of flights it makes to Australia. Ms King says she consulted widely but could not say with who. The big question is what role, if any, did the Prime Minister play in the decision and was it influenced by his close relationship with former Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce, who has retired from the airline early with a multimillion-dollar bonus handshake to allow the company to reboot from scandal.
With Mr Albanese overseas for an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Jakarta and a meeting of G20 leaders in New Delhi, the image presented from Canberra has been one of spectacular disorganisation. The ill-discipline is not confined to aviation. Business groups are at odds with the federal government over Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke’s second raft of changes to industrial relations laws. Bitten by a lack of proper consultation on the reintroduction of multi-employer bargaining at the Jobs and Skills Summit, business is right to be wary of what the second-tranche reforms – rebranded from “same work, same pay” to “closing loopholes” – have in store.
Rather than open dialogue, Mr Burke has required employer groups to sign nondisclosure agreements to participate in discussions. It was not until legislation was tabled in parliament that the full extent of the reforms became known. The bill includes a new definition for what is an employee, vastly expanded powers for the Fair Work Commission and a clampdown on the use of labour-hire workers. Attempts by Mr Burke to force the changes through were derailed in the Senate, where key crossbenchers joined the Coalition to delay a vote until at least February to allow a proper examination of the complex, 284-page bill and 521-page explanatory memorandum.
The approach taken to IR smacks of the same sort of hubris that has engulfed what should have been a nation-building reform to recognise Indigenous Australians. Instead, the voice referendum campaign is mired in division and confusion to the point that opinion polls show it will fail to reach majority support. The poor polling is also reflected in the government’s own standing. As editor-at-large Paul Kelly writes in Inquirer on Saturday, Mr Albanese has broken every rule in the book on how to prevail in a referendum.
The same is true on the economy, which this week was shown to be in per-capita recession as consumer confidence, savings and spending have slumped in the face of higher interest rates. The slowdown is exactly what the Reserve Bank has sought to engineer and it should limit the need for further rises. But Jim Chalmers has yet to demonstrate he has the recipe to respond to the economic headwinds. Rather than remake independent institutions to better reflect his world view, the Treasurer could better spend his political capital fixing a tax system that relies disproportionately on personal income tax and a company tax rate that is demonstrably higher than our competitors’. Credible reform ideas on taxation and airline competition are too easily ruled out before they are properly tested. Reforming the GST to remove state imposts could help to ease the housing crisis as well as offset the warnings made in the Intergenerational Report about the unsustainability of the current tax system.
More vigorous competition in the airline industry by allowing foreign airlines to carry domestic passengers and breaking monopolistic practices at airports are other reform areas where consideration appears to have been snuffed out prematurely. Honeymoon over, the Albanese government must return to the promises it has made to consult properly, be open in its decision-making and willing to make the decisions of a reforming government for the nation, not vested interests and the trade union movement.