New response for the times to IR row

Anthony Albanese has reached into Labor’s bag of scares and old political ploys with a demand that Scott Morrison guarantee “no worker will be worse off” as a result of the Coalition’s industrial relations reforms.

But the Prime Minister has a new response, fitting the new attitudes of the COVID-19 pandemic and recession, that avoids the trap that has killed so many reforms and hamstrung so many leaders.

Morrison’s new response to the old question is: “If you are a worker who is not in a job, you’re worse off. So our plan is to get workers back into jobs who are not in jobs.”

Simple, direct, doesn’t make a promise that is impossible to achieve or define, and uses the terrible uncertainty about employment that has grown from the pandemic.

Demanding that no one, not a single person or worker, be worse off has become a baseline used to oppose reforms since the 1990s. Labor used it to campaign against the GST from 1998 and with greater effect against John Howard’s WorkChoices reforms.

It was such a powerful defining argument that the state premiers even got a law that no state would be worse off under GST funding and, as opposition leader, Tony Abbott had to declare “nobody will be worse off” under his industrial relations plans.

Kevin Rudd even used it for a while as prime minister during the industrial relations changes that began in 2007.

It’s political sophistry that defies measurement and doesn’t allow for the complexities of changes to work conditions and pay.

The Opposition Leader still wants to use the old rules while Morrison and Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter try to move into the post-COVID era and talk about “co-operation not conflict” and “getting 500,000 employees back into the workplace”.

WorkChoices has left its scars on the Coalition and given Labor a strategic political legacy but Morrison seems intent on moving into a new era.