Militant unions have Michaelia Cash on their case

Employment Minister Michaelia Cash has a daunting reputation as a parliamentary performer.

Senator Michaella Cash went off at Senator Wong in the Senate accusing her of having blood on her hands and vile acts against the sister hood.

There’s a story about Employment Minister Michaelia Cash that dates back to her time as a lawyer at Freehills.

Working on a high-profile industrial relations case against the construction union last decade, Cash stepped into a lift with two union officials. In front of the cameras, the story goes, the union guys had been all smiles. But alone in the lift they “went her” with a shockingly abusive tirade, which ­abruptly ended when the lift doors opened and it was time to smile for the cameras again.

“She never forgot that ­moment,” one of Cash’s Canberra confidants says.

The incident might have been in the back of her mind years later when in June she rose to her feet in the upper house as a senator for Western Australia and attacked the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union for defending officials who had committed, she claimed, “outrageous acts of violence against women”.

And it must still have been in the back of her mind a mere three months after that in September this year when Malcolm Turnbull promoted her to cabinet and gave her the Coalition’s union-busting industrial relations portfolio.

In an interview with The Australian after her appointment, Cash made a frank assessment of the construction union: “They’re militants. They don’t play by the rules and they should be held ­accountable. It’s as simple as that.”

In the same interview, she praised Margaret Thatcher as a woman who found her way in a man’s world and conveyed a difficult message to the people.

It all bolsters Cash’s credentials to take on the unions ahead of the findings of the royal commission into trade union governance and corruption, which will report in December. And beyond that, at next year’s general election, which is shaping up to be the first to consider workers’ wages and conditions since the Coalition’s disastrous 2007 defeat over John Howard’s Work Choices industrial relations policy.

At the prospect of another such battle, the unions say “bring it on”.

Even so, Cash’s aside about Thatcher — an enthusiastic response to a question about a 2011 speech to her old high school — stunned the labour movement, playing out in social media land where the unions are king.

“There’s a hairstyle that hates unions” went one comment on a blog, referring to Cash’s impeccable coiffure, which bears some resemblance to Thatcher’s.

Of course, conservative supporters were delighted with the comments. “We have high hopes for her,” says the Centre for Independent Studies’ James Paterson.

In appointing Cash to the IR role, Turnbull elevated a powerful parliamentary performer.

As the junior immigration minister, she won a federal case against the Maritime Union of Australia over the government’s issuance of special purpose visas for offshore oil and gas workers. She took on the union’s campaign over 457 visas, accusing them of running the “fraudulent” and “hypocritical” line that she was perpetuating the use of cheap foreign labour.

Says independent senator Bob Day, who has watched Cash from his seat on the crossbenches: “She’s one of the most impressive parliamentary performers I’ve ever seen. She’s a big slugger. She hits every ball over the fence for six. That’s why they don’t ask her many questions; she demolishes them. It’s a pity there aren’t more like her. She’s across her brief. She knows her stuff backwards.”

Effervescent and charismatic, Cash was praised for being an energetic and effective junior minister to Scott Morrison and then Peter Dutton in immigration and assisting Tony Abbott on women.

Cash has an excellent relationship with Julie Bishop, the most senior female parliamentarian and a fellow West Australian.

While the two didn’t know each other in Perth, since Cash entered parliament in 2008 they’re known to have become “mates”.

Although Cash’s comments some years ago that she was “not a feminist” attracted some fire, she is passionate about increasing workforce participation for women.

Turnbull, in the days after the reshuffle, said he didn’t want to wage war with the unions. But it helps him to have a nuclear weapon in his arsenal. Because despite the conditional olive branch the ACTU extended after he seized the leadership from ­Abbott, and the amicable feeling at last week’s Canberra summit, the unions still might want to wage war with him.

Says one senior union source, “I was telling a meeting of delegates yesterday … Turnbull is a merchant banker. He believes in de­regulation. He is tipping his hand towards penalty rates. There’s an argument to be had, and we’re going to have it.”

To this end, the union movement has amassed a war chest estimated at about $30 million.

The plan for a grassroots door-knocking and cold-calling campaign based on last year’s success in the Victorian election using a volunteer army comprising workers from firefighters to teachers to target marginal seats won’t prove expensive.

Much of the big spend will go on TV advertising. The labour movement is particularly pleased with the response to the anti-China free-trade agreement ads by Melbourne guru Bill Shannon.

Luke Hilakari, the Victorian Trades Hall secretary who helped to mastermind last year’s Victorian campaign, told The Weekend Australian: “If Minister Cash takes cutting penalty rates to the next election we’ll fight the Liberal Party all the way to the ballot box.”

In recent weeks, penalty rates have become a lightning rod for the IR debate in the community.

Cash says it is an “unfair flashpoint”.

Since taking over the portfolio she has backed the view of employer groups that weekend loadings belong in “history” while Turnbull has hinted at the inevitability of penalty rate reform.

But as Turnbull and Cash are at pains to point out, there is no deviation from Coalition policy, which promises not to meddle in the Fair Work Commission’s process for setting penalties. The commission is not expected to make a decision before next year.

In an attempt to move the debate along John Hart, of the hospitality industry lobby group Restaurant & Catering Australia has asked Cash to make a submission to the Fair Work Commission pushing the industry’s case for penalty rate cuts.

The government has ruled this out until now.

But Hart is confident Cash will at least take his plea to reconsider back to cabinet.

“We’ve found her very open,” he says.

Next month’s Productivity Commission report on its workplace relations inquiry could prove a game changer. Cash promises a “careful and methodical” review of the report, which rules out a snap judgment on whether to adopt the review’s recommendations but strongly suggests it will form the case for changes. The Coalition then will seek a mandate from the people to make them.

However, a more immediate test of Cash’s powers of persuasion looms ahead of the next election.

Cash is now charged with shepherding the government’s workplace relations bills through the Senate, where they have stalled.

Day says the legislation, which includes changes to how workplace agreements are struck under the Fair Work Act, has come up against with “100 years of class warfare rhetoric” from opposition senators. “Even the most benign change or amendment, even changing a comma in the Fair Work Act, the response is always the same, hours and hours of rhetoric: ‘You don’t care about the poor, you only care about the rich. Why are you hitting the most disadvantaged?’ Hours and hours,” Day says.

“You have to understand most of the opposition are union to their bootstraps. This is what they grew up on. This is what they were weaned on. They eat, sleep and breathe unionised workforce.”

Other bills to resurrect the Coalition’s powerful Australian Building and Construction Commission watchdog — designed to bring the CFMEU to heel — and changes to the Registered Organisations laws that would bring rules for unions into line with companies were also defeated in the face of insurmountable resistance from Labor and the unions.

“The unions were meeting with the crossbenchers and fuelling an idea in the crossbenchers’ heads that (our legislation) … would be a return to Work Choices,” says a source close to Cash’s predecessor, Eric Abetz.

“The ACTU was up at Parliament House on a regular basis with (crossbenchers) Jacqui Lambie and Glenn Lazarus. Good luck to (Cash) trying to change that.”

Ultimately, Abetz was unable to make a powerful case for the legislation out of fear of the union backlash. Abetz was “doing exact­ly what he was told to do and keep the temperature down”.

Did the Coalition’s legislation suffer as a result?

“Of course.”

What’s more, the government’s agenda is still to keep “the temperature down on the issue”.

It doesn’t seem to bode well for the new minister, but Day says Cash does not share Abetz’s “dour” demeanour.

“I’m not sure what the previous approach necessarily was,” Cash told The Australian in her post-spill interview. “My approach ­always was to sit down and talk to people and listen to their concerns if they have any. You have to bring the people with you.”

Among the biggest campaigners for industrial relations reform is the building industry lobby Master Builders Australia.

MBA chief executive Wilhelm Harnisch says that to beat the unions in the IR debate in the Senate and more widely across the nation, Turnbull and Cash must demonstrate how every workplace relations reform will benefit communities and households.

It’s not an easy task. Arguably, this is what the Productivity Commission was asked by the government do to and its draft report failed to satisfy many. Yet all sides seem to agree on the need for change to usher the economy through the post-mining slump.

Opposition workplace relations spokesman Brendan O’Connor says the pace of change today “makes the Industrial Revolution look like an evolution” and we need a plan to stay competitive. But he won’t countenance any cuts to wages.

Industry says it is relying on Turnbull to devise a deft policy that will resonate with the electorate. “Cash needs a story to sell. IR is not an end in itself, it’s a means to a broader end,” says Harnisch.

Her success will depend on whether she has the support of her department, while working closely with the rest of cabinet.

“It’s a great portfolio that can make or break her,” Harnisch says.

“This is only the beginning.”