Business is waking up to the threat of Labor policies

Resources Minister Madeleine King has left no doubt about how badly big business has misread its relationship with Labor. Company boards that allowed themselves to lose sight of their main task of ensuring efficiency and profitability to indulge in fashionable social causes now find themselves under fire across a broad front.

This includes the potential for increased taxes and other anti-business measures directed by the far-left Greens, who are intent on turning their balance of power in the Senate into minority government with the ALP at the next election.

The turning point for business was the Albanese government’s jobs summit that turned out to be nothing more than a ruse to reassert trade union power across the economy. Changes to industry-wide bargaining that were sold as a measure to reduce costs for small business in wage negotiations have been exposed for what they always were – a bid to re-unionise the major industries that drive the nation’s prosperity.

At the pinnacle are the massive mining projects in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. BHP has woken to the threat and refused to play along, first by rejecting government offers to subsidise unprofitable nickel operations and, second, by warning of the dangers that Labor’s new industrial relations laws pose to productivity and profits.

BHP chief executive Mike Henry argued correctly that subsidising loss-making ventures was a fool’s errand. He warned on Tuesday that Labor’s same job, same pay reforms would lift costs and worsen productivity.

Ms King struck back, accusing BHP of failing to appreciate the Labor message. “Yes, we are a Labor government,” she said on Thursday. “The government’s bargaining ­reforms are working as intended – our reforms were designed to ­encourage employers back to the bargaining table.”

Given Ms King has been considered a reasonable voice in Labor, most notably on the need for more gas to assist the energy transition, her outburst signals the potential dangers for business that lie ahead. This is even more so given Ms King comes from mining-astute Western Australia and her latest comments were made as industry leaders gathered to lament the impacts of current Labor policies.

Top of the list is federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s rejection, for undisclosed cultural-heritage reasons, of a tailings dam for Regis Resources’ proposed $1bn McPhillamys goldmine project in NSW. When added to concerns about energy security and further potential blocks to major gas and other mining projects, big business is starting to get the message that industry groups have been eager to ignore for too long.

The stakes are made higher by plans to redraw the nation’s “nature positive” environmental laws in a way that will give the federal government greater power over state development decisions.

The potential pain is not confined to mining, with grocery chains, retailers, banks and property investors increasingly in the sights of government and the opportunistic minor parties and independents.

This week’s high core inflation numbers, despite rising unemployment and worsening consumer sentiment and demand, should persuade the government to ease wage pressures and reduce public sector spending. Instead, the Fair Work Commission is looking to enshrine the right to work from home into national awards. And the Albanese team has been distracted by the demands of social progressives on issues such as fast-tracking Palestinian refugees and counting transgender Australians in the census.

Industry leaders have been slow to learn their lesson but are starting to distance themselves from the government’s fortunes. Business must stick to its knitting. And the government should act quickly to reset its focus towards safeguarding the nation’s areas of natural advantage.