If it weren’t for their nauseating virtue-signalling and their stupidity, you could almost feel sorry for big business. As the second wave of the government’s industrial relations legislation, the dishonestly named Closing Loopholes Bill, lands on them, the full enormity of their folly must be hitting big business like a hammer blow.
Few business leaders may have read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but the famous phrase “The horror! The horror!” is the best literary summary of how they must feel. Having cosied up to the ALP and to every progressive cause available in the hope and pious belief an ALP government would stick to its promises of moderate policy changes, corporate Australia has been dumped in favour of the ALP’s real owner, the union movement.
Wresting back policy settings to somewhere more centrist in areas ranging from IR to energy will take years – and a change of government. This is both Peter Dutton’s big opportunity and big challenge. While the Coalition will always, and must always, vigorously support small business and entrepreneurs, it owes absolutely nothing to big business.
Big business has ignored, even mocked, social policies favoured by Coalition voters such as religious freedoms and opposition to the voice, and makes a virtue of not donating a red cent to the Coalition without an equal and opposite donation to the ALP.
So just as unions extract a huge policy quid pro quo for every dollar they give the ALP, the Opposition Leader should be telling big business unless there is a historic realignment of interests, they can forget about being rescued from Tony Burke’s IR reforms next time the Liberals are in office.
Dutton should then proceed to extract the toughest deal he can from the Business Council of Australia and its fellow travellers. It shouldn’t be too hard – we know from the state of play in IR that big business couldn’t negotiate its way out of a paper bag.
Of course, in an ideal world, “cash for policy” would be illegal. It is, after all, the brutish first cousin of the sort of pork-barrelling the teals once upon a time complained about so bitterly. However, as the central feature of the ALP’s business model, it’s hard to see it being challenged.
Who could forget, for example, the way in which the Albanese government had only just finished unpacking the boxes in their new offices when they started paying off those who had helped them into power. First off the grid, Stephen Jones thanked industry super funds, and their union sponsors, by killing off requirements that the funds disclose details of any payments or benefits they or their affiliates give to unions or their affiliates. Then came the reward to litigation funders and the plaintiff law firms in the form of an exemption from the managed investment scheme regulations. Then came multi-employer bargaining rules. Now, of course, comes the biggest thankyou of all, again to the union movement – the Closing Loopholes Bill.
If this business model is here to stay, the Coalition needs to embrace it as effectively as the ALP. Alas, it would be too gauche for the Coalition to actually demand money from big business – even though, by contrast, unions have no qualms donating cold, hard cash to the ALP. After all, BHP, Rio Tinto and many other corporations have codes of conduct banning political donations. They say, dripping with sanctimony, that their various stakeholders all have different political perspectives and they must stay apolitical out of respect for those varying perspectives. But lo and behold, it is OK for many of them to dive into the single most divisive issue in Australian political life in years – the voice debate – with powerful support, often financial, for one side of the debate only.
Coincidentally, the Yes campaign is on the opposite side of the debate to most of their individual shareholders, if polls are to be believed. Simultaneously, many of the most prominent directors of these corporations are stomping around the country signing letters of support for the voice, and some are even pestering other companies to give money to the Yes campaign. If the boards of big corporations can argue their fiduciary duties require them to give money to the Yes campaign, it should be child’s play to find justifications for supporting Coalition policies come election time.
They may have to grow a bit creative about it and use more subtle techniques than the unions; for example, by putting serious money into the BCA and directing it and other third-party vehicles to campaign long, loud and hard on issues that matter to a company.
No doubt Dutton will be very well-mannered in extracting assistance of this kind, but he should not be too subtle. The ALP playbook should be all he needs.
Dutton should not stop at money. If big business wants support from the Coalition to roll back the tidal wave of new IR legislation, big business will have to stop laughing at the social and cultural values of the Coalition and its supporters.
In the US, the backlash towards woke corporations has started in earnest and is being adopted by politicians starting with, but by no means limited to, Ron DeSantis. Disney has every right to disagree with Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law but it had to expect consequences when it jumped into the middle of a hotly contested political issue, with the elected governor stripping Disney of its longstanding Florida tax concessions as payback. In Australia, you don’t have to be a cultural conservative or an evangelical Christian to have grown heartily sick of the progressive discipline enforced by doctrinaire HR departments and their corporate communications colleagues, where diversity doesn’t stretch to diversity of opinion.
Dutton will not want to wade publicly into what will be portrayed as the culture wars. And he won’t have to. After all, nobody finds the fingerprints of industry super funds on the corporate policies of Australian listed companies either. However, wouldn’t it be nice for Coalition supporters to find that Australian corporations no longer sneer at their social or cultural values? And if that happens at the same time as the Coalition rolls back the ALP’s IR extremism, that would be a very happy coincidence indeed.
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