Lay Down Sally McManus betrays all her flock

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke.

Shame on Sally McManus. Having pretended that she would work hard to help the country get through this shocking economic crisis, the ACTU secretary has laid down her oars, exhausted with the notion of national good. When it comes to playing for the national team, pursuing the greater good, millions of working Australians and hundreds of thousands of unemployed people cannot rely on Lay Down Sally. The union leader, who has confirmed she is an ideologue, not a nation-builder, has disqualified herself from having a front-row seat at the post-COVID-19 reform table.

It was a sweet, naive suggestion from the Morrison government that McManus, an old-style 1970s union warrior from the hard left, join forces with other stakeholders, businesses big and small, the unemployed and underemployed Australians, to help reform the national economy during the biggest economic crisis to hit this country since World War II.

Scott Morrison and Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter have created five committees with 10 standing members charged with proposing economic reforms on everything from workplace relations, award simplification, enterprise bargaining and greenfields agreements for new projects. The union movement will fill half of the standing seats. What illegal product were the Prime Minister and Porter smoking when they imagined they could join hands and sing Kumbaya with McManus?

Late last week, the ACTU secretary made it clear she would not support the Morrison government bringing forward income tax cuts for Australian workers in the October budget. In effect, she has told workers that she, and the union movement, and their fully funded political arm, the Labor Party, do not believe workers deserve to have more of their own money returned to their pockets because they can’t be trusted to spend it wisely. According to the union warrior, workers’ rights don’t extend to workers having the right to decide how to spend more of their own money.

Is there a more rudely paternalistic, ideological political leader in the country? McManus has made it clear to all that she believes the government will spend your money better than you, and we, the union movement, will tell them how to spend it.

Despite long complaining that workers don’t have enough money in their pockets because wage growth is low, and at a time when workers are suffering, McManus wants the government to keep more of workers’ wages. In other words, it is politics as usual at the ACTU under McManus.

ACTU secretary Sally McManus. Picture: File

We have long known of the union movement’s deadly conflict when it comes to helping the unemployed find jobs. By seeking higher wages and more favourable conditions no matter the economic circumstances, the ACTU routinely puts the interests of those with jobs ahead of those without. Don’t believe me. That’s what former Labor senator Peter Walsh, former finance minister and stalwart in the Hawke government, said.

Now we know McManus and the union movement are also against the employed keeping more of their own money even when workers are hurting financially from the economic crisis. It is blind ideology.

If the Morrison government brings forward the next two stages of legislated tax cuts, the 19 per cent tax rate will apply up to $45,000, not the present $37,000, the 32.5 per cent tax rate will be reduced to 30 per cent, the 37 per cent rate will be abolished and the top rate of 45 per cent will cut in only at $200,000. So every dollar earned from $45,001 to $200,000 will be taxed at the lower rate of 30 per cent. These cuts will benefit middle Australia the most as the biggest proportion of income falls in these brackets. Indeed, 94 per cent of Australians will pay a marginal rate no higher than 30c in the dollar once these come into effect, compared with about 75 per cent of Australians who paid 32.5c in the dollar in 2017-18.

Instead of bringing forward tax cuts for Australian workers, McManus says the Morrison government should make sure rich people and big companies are paying their “fair share”. Her perpetual obsession with stoking a class war at a time of economic crisis is cheap politics. Under the legislated tax rates, the rich will pay even more tax. What tax rorts is McManus alluding to, then? For individuals, does she want to get rid of franking credits, negative gearing and make more changes to superannuation? Hang on, we had an election about that last year and Australians overwhelmingly rejected those tax grabs.

With this call for companies to pay their “fair share” of tax, it seems McManus’s problem is that her grasp of basic economics and tax is apparently the same as ABC economics reporter Emma Alberici. The union leader confuses revenue with profits — she doesn’t seem to realise that when a company doesn’t make any profits, it doesn’t pay any tax.

It is easy to expose the depths of McManus’s class war hatreds. Just ask her whether she is interested in stopping the tax leakage from the black economy estimated by the Australian Taxation Office’s Black Economy Taskforce to cost up to $50bn a year, potentially 3 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.

McManus is also opposed to award simplification. But has she tried to run a business, employ and pay employees under today’s award system? The last “modernisation” process was overrated. True enough it reduced 3715 state and federal awards to 122 “modern” awards but it condensed rather than removed complexity. Has McManus even sat down with restaurant owners to understand how complex the 23,500-word Restaurant Industry Award is?

What makes this period in Australia’s history different is that our complacency about economic growth must now end. We are about to experience levels of economic and social hardship we haven’t seen for more than a half-century. At the time of the last recession, in 1993, the union movement was headed by a leader who embraced economic reforms for the greater good. Today, not only do we have a union movement seeking to take money out of workers’ pockets for ideological reasons, but it is in an unholy alliance with a union-dominated industry super fund sector that seeks to take ever greater sums out of workers’ wallets to preserve the rivers of gold flowing to the funds and the corporate influence that gold buys them. The mix of blind union ideology and the industry super fund quest for workers’ money and political influence is not in the national good.

While it was bearable, though clearly not preferable, to have an anti-growth ideologue in charge of the ACTU when the country racked up 29 years of uninterrupted growth, the nation can no longer afford McManus and her deeply held objections to tax cuts for workers and reforms to help the unemployed into jobs. If more Australians wake up to McManus, then perhaps this is another recession we had to have.