Labor’s Registered Organisations move should be feared

This is purely a stab in the dark, but I am guessing you don’t suffer from an acute fear of failure.

On the list of things to fear, failure probably doesn’t rate highly, whereas fear of other things, such as the next tax bill, may. Perhaps the failure you worry about most, the one that keeps you up at night, is the failure of this federal government, like the few before it, to rein in spending and manage the country properly. Never mind my worries about my own failure, PM, you may be thinking, you just worry about yourself.

Nevertheless, when Malcolm Turnbull says we shouldn’t be afraid of failure, as he did in his innovation statement this week, it must be providing a confidence boost for some. For instance, Bill Shorten and his team have taken the message literally and completely cast aside their fear of failure. How else do we explain their strange scheme for cleaning up the unions?

Labor’s registered organisations offering was released just after parliament concluded for the year, which is the political equivalent of turning up to a party with a crate of expensive booze just after everyone has gone to bed and the house is in complete darkness. Three times now, Labor has voted against the Coalition’s registered organisations bill. Shorten has consistently spoken against increasing penalties on union officials for breaches of law. The royal commission into union governance has been abused, rubbished, and we have heard umpteen hysterical demands it be shut down.

Now, all of a sudden, on the cusp of the findings being released, Labor acts. The witch-hunt uncovered quite a lot of witches, it seems, so there is a need to appear to be doing something.

Labor’s plan is offered conditionally as part of a bizarre deal that the government agree to make completely unrelated changes to other legislation that has nothing to do with workplaces, or unions.

Labor wants the electoral act changed so that anyone who donates more than $1000 to any political party has to be identified. This appears to be a move to cripple the Coalition’s finances by publicly outing its support base. Labor doesn’t offer to do anything about its own financial channels. Presently, if a business wants to put money into Labor’s pocket and doesn’t want anyone to know about it, it can give the money to a union. This gift requires no disclosure. The union can take a cut, pass the money on to Labor as union affiliation fees, and nobody is the wiser.

Changes to the electoral act may or may not be warranted, but this has little to do with the issue of workplace corruption. Industrial relations and politics make for a disastrous mix, but unfortunately for Labor and union types the two issues are inseparably intertwined. This is why the party has such a skewed vision of the workplace corruption issue. Its mindset and policy are built on the premise of two extraordinary propositions.

The first proposition is that corruption in unions is defined as when a union official spends money from the union’s membership for the purposes of personal gain. Apart from this narrow and simplistic definition of corruption, when it comes to harvesting and spending money, pretty much anything goes.

If a union official takes money from employers in secret and hands it into the union office so the officials collectively can spend it on whatever they want, this is not deemed to be corruption.

If the union official takes money in secret in return for slashing the wages of workers and spends that money on furthering his career, then this is not defined as corruption. Because the career the money was spent on is in the Labor Party, this will benefit all working people indirectly; therefore the workers who had their wages slashed will end up benefiting more broadly in the long run by living in a society with policies that are geared to helping workers generally.

The second proposition is that criminal behaviour by union officials is acceptable because it occurs within the industrial relations context. Laws that apply to every other person don’t apply to union officials because they alone carry out sacred work for the benefit of working people.

This week, when two construction union officials were charged with blackmail, their lawyer said the charges had arisen in an “industrial context and will be strongly defended”.

ACTU president Ged Kearney said the charges were simply criminalising industrial relations activity and the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union’s construction division national secretary Dave Noonan said, “the issue here is … whether industrial relations should be turned into a criminal matter”, before going on to remind us all there was no evidence the two officials had tried to benefit personally from their ­actions.

Shorten and his team have their fingers crossed Turnbull will agree to support their policy instead of coming up with his own. Hopefully he won’t, but if you want something to fear, fear this.