The likelihood is now that the bulk of the laws will pass with minor party support in the Senate in the face of total Labor opposition, be in place well before the election and defuse the ALP’s self-declared political priority of workers’ pay.
It’s also a further demonstration that the Prime Minister prefers incremental policy advances to vainglorious parliamentary defeats that throw out all potential gains.
On a day when even more COVID-19 vaccine was approved and Australia led the world in forcing global tech giants to pay a fair price for content, Morrison wasn’t about to be distracted by highly technical arguments about workers pay and conditions that hadn’t had time to gain traction.
What’s more, he’s prepared to face criticism from hardliners on his own side in the name of addressing basic pandemic concerns about job security and politically outflanking Anthony Albanese.
Even with changes allowing deals to be made that ran foul of the better-off test, the proposed industrial relations reforms were indeed modest, didn’t satisfy conservative demands and were nowhere near John Howard’s WorkChoices laws. Yet Labor decided to strategically block the legislation holus bolus, including the first laws to criminalise wage theft, in an attempt to re-run the successful union campaign against WorkChoices at the 2007 election and make “pay cuts under cover of COVID” the key appeal to workers.
Labor’s parliamentary tactics about the industrial relations changes relied on technical arguments and were undermined by the Opposition Leader’s quick retreat on his own alternative industrial relations policy.
On Tuesday, Morrison was upfront as to why the government backed off changing the better-off test after demands from One Nation and other independent senators: “I’ve always been very clear we’re seeking to get things done here. Where things can’t get done and the parliament doesn’t support things, then why would we put people through that process?”
In parliament, he responded to Albanese’s allegations that the Coalition was using COVID as cover to cut workers’ pay by repeating his mantra that the government was about “getting people into work as we get out of COVID”.
Labor had “overreached”, he said — its policies didn’t help workers or bosses, its politics “has just been about ‘no’ ” and Albanese was the leader of the “no opposition”. “Is Labor going to drop the politics now and get on with it so we can get people back into jobs?” he asked.
Labor’s response was to concentrate in parliament on allegations of sexual assault and how the government dealt with the terrible incident, but Tony Burke, as Labor’s industrial relations spokesman, did not produce a political riposte. The Morrison government had confirmed it wanted to cut workers’ pay, he said, and the retreat in the Senate was just tactical and if re-elected Morrison would return to throwing out the BOOT.
Labor’s been sidelined on the legislation and faces up to a year to maintain the rage.
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The Coalition’s dropping of its most contentious proposed industrial relations changes — the so-called better-off overall test, BOOT — is yet more proof that Scott Morrison is driven by pragmatism, practicality and politics.