Deal once and for all with workplace corruption

Kilim ded pinis. This phrase, a personal favourite, is pidgin English for “kill them dead, finish”.

The Papua New Guineans are fearless warriors. It was a privilege to spend the first decade of life among them in a remote village. My parents were missionaries until 1980.

Most PNG types are warm and generous, and might lay down their life to help another. However, existence in a primitive settlement means one must employ explosive violence in the blink of an eye. One minute someone could be digging up sweet potatoes, the next they could be hacking someone to death with a bush knife because there is no other option.

As soon as the body is disposed of, perhaps tossed in the river, attention would turn back to the sweet potatoes with a focus on making up the lost time. After all, there are always hungry children to feed and no time for self-indulgent dramatics.

In our PNG village, survival of the fittest was the only guiding conviction, or core belief, worth investing in. From dawn until dusk, necessity is the driver of all activity.

There is no electricity, no communication, no healthcare, no concept of a thing called government, no police or any other formal authority.

When trouble strikes, there is nothing but your own will to survive, to run or fight, and if there is to be a fight then hopefully there is a weapon. Sentimentality is non-existent and emotions are a rare luxury. Violence occurs regularly, has layers of magnitude and kilim ded pinis in our village was used to describe the three categories of assault.

Kilim means to “kill”, but in reality it means to knock someone to the ground, clobber them over the head with a hard stick or something. It is not permanent, it is more for show. The other person will jump up and retaliate, so it is foolish to only kilim.

Kilim ded means to “kill them dead”, meaning to really incapacitate for a while, perhaps with a spear through the leg. This is a bit more serious, but only a job half done as the person will eventually recover and seek revenge. It is extremely foolish to antagonise someone by only kilim ded.

Kilim ded pinis means to “kill them dead, finish”. The person is “finished”, meaning the body disappears, hacked to pieces, fed to the wild dogs, whatever, but the person that once was simply no longer exists, there is no evidence they ever walked the earth.

When dealing with an enemy that seeks to kilim ded pinis on you, kilim ded pinis is the only response. Of course, there is always the risk the person’s relatives may find out and retaliate, and then the cycle begins afresh with kilim ded pinis again the only hope of a permanent solution.

Australia now needs groundbreaking reform to deal with, broadly speaking, two types of workplace corruption.

There is serious, ingrained, anti-competitive, corporatised corruption in our biggest industries between some of the major businesses in our country and unions, and there is misconduct within unions themselves.

In my opinion, the former is far more serious, harmful and wide-reaching than the latter. After all, the thuggish conduct, the demands for bribes, only occur because at the top of the food chain a corporate is in partnership with a union and allowing it veto over which companies it will employ. Unfortunately, this is long-term standard business practice in several of our key sectors. If every single corporate doing so abandoned its collusive deals with key unions tomorrow, the serious problems we have would mostly melt away and our cost of living would fall.

Our government has some industrial relations reforms it wants passed through the Senate. As far as these proposals go, they are worthy, but hail from last year before the royal commission into trade union governance made its excellent recommendations for policy change.

The language that has been used by the Prime Minister and others in cabinet when talking about these proposals has focused only on unions.

There isn’t candid discussion about the core of our problems and it has put key senators off-side.

Further, to categorise the proposals using the PNG measure, the reforms are of the kilim variety.

Sure, they will be a blow but the bad guys will bounce back, their mutually beneficial partnerships stronger than ever. We need to get serious. In terms of dealing with these issues, we don’t need kilim, or even kilim ded. We need kilim ded pinis. The problems we have affect every single person because they make living here far more expensive and restrictive than it needs to be, and give us the international reputation of being an expensive, corrupt backwater. Perhaps the reforms should be withdrawn and redesigned with the language recalibrated to focus on both parties to corruption and the package put up as a one-off, all or nothing, do or die measure.