Federal election 2016: deals make unskilled best paid

Two cheers for Bill Shorten. It was looking like a flat eight weeks until the Opposition Leader released his inner socialist, stood shoulder to shoulder with the slave class, workers and peasants and ­denounced the running dogs of capitalism.

Keith DeLacy — a former Labor state treasurer no less — called Shorten’s opposition to tax cuts the most anti-business Labor policy in living memory. It is hard to disagree. How can Shorten be serious about economic growth when he casts corporate Australia as the enemy?

Shorten’s reply to the budget was a class-war classic: “From Tony’s Tradies to Malcolm’s Millionaires — this is a budget for big business over battlers. Tax cuts for high income earners — and nothing for families. Not one cent for ordinary working Australians.”

That last bit isn’t strictly true. The condition of the Australian working class is not as precarious as Shorten implies, particularly those on CFMEU enterprise bargaining agreements. Last week we learned that concrete pourers on government-funded projects in Melbourne are earning around $3000 a week — twice the wage of the average police officer, firefighter, soldier, teacher or nurse. Shorten’s “millionaire tax cuts”, the ones that kick in at $1538 a week, have no doubt brought joy to construction sites from Melbourne to Darwin.

A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work and all that, but how, you might ask, did the labour market become so skewed that an unskilled or semi-skilled construction worker finds himself in the top income decile? And why would the Labor Party, the friend of the lowly and the dispossessed, be going out of its way to ensure they stay there?

The declaration of political donations kept by the Australian Electoral Commission offers a clue. The CFMEU has donated almost $1.5 million to the ALP’s Victorian branch since 2007-08. No wonder a grateful Labor Premier is mute on the outrageous pay deal that will cost taxpayers dearly. Signing up to the CFMEU’s EBA adds about 30 per cent to the cost of public infrastructure. To put it another way, with the CFMEU’s pampered members on the job, you miss out on 300km of road for every 1000km that get built.

Labor’s obsequious deference towards its union sponsors is the reason Australians are going to the polls to elect both houses. Labor, in cahoots with the Greens — who also accept CFMEU donations — refused to support the re-establishment of the watchdog that might have kept this surly syndicate in check.

Comradeship apart, Shorten can ill afford to get the CFMEU offside. Doing so would knock a seven-figure hole in Labor’s election fund. If the CFMEU was a listed company that bunged a lazy million to the Libs in return for legislative favours, the ICAC sleuths in Sydney would be on the case in no time with the ABC in hot pursuit.

To be fair to those responsible for last week’s Four Corners, union donations were mentioned, even if it was 25 minutes into the program when everyone bar a few political tragics would have switched over to catch the end of The Voice.

Back on Channel 2, Quentin McDermott seemed to surprise Penny Wong with the impertinence of his question: “Doesn’t Labor demonstrate its gratitude to the unions day in, day out?”

“Well,” Wong began, forcing a laugh, “to suggest there’s some analogy between a bundle of cash and a longstanding, transparent and public and historical relationship with the trade union movement, I think, is a pretty long bow.”

“Transparent” is not how everyone would describe it. Who could forget Shorten sitting in the witness box at the Heydon royal commission admitting he’d been somewhat opaque about a “bundle of cash” from the AWU to his 2007 campaign fund?

Still, what’s a paltry $40,000 between longstanding, transparent and historical friends? The AWU gave more than $2.7m to the ALP when Shorten was national secretary and, since his election to parliament, it’s given almost $4.5m more. Total declared union donations to the ALP since 2007-08 add up to $53.8m.

A cursory scan of Labor’s 100 Positive Policies shows how unions bearing gifts have virtually bought the party. Labor is opposing modest changes to weekend penalty rates in accordance with the wishes of the SDA, the comrades who slipped the party $2.3m to fight the last election.

Labor’s plans to impose protection on the steel industry will delight the AWU while its promise to strengthen rights at work and clamp down on foreign seasonal employment will be popular across the whole union movement. Labor has pledged to restore the Commonwealth Cleaning Services Guidelines scrapped by the Coalition, which mandated above award wages to cleaners in commonwealth government buildings and obliged contractors to promote union membership to new employees, arrange meetings between employees and union officials and invite union delegates to attend induction training.

Which union would that be? United Voice, which has given more than $3.7m to the Labor Party since the guidelines were introduced in 2012.

Labor promises to bring back the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, the anti-competitive, quasi-judicial body that looked set to put 35,000 single-truck operators out of business before it was abolished. The tribunal was the bastard child of a tawdry union between Labor and one its biggest donors, the TWU.

The brazenness with which Labor strikes these shabby deals is astonishing given the damage they do to the economy. Labor and its acolytes would like to draw a moral distinction between horse­trading with the unions and trading with other rentseekers but the result is the same. Vested interest gets its way while Australian taxpayers and consumers get dudded.

In his recent book, misleadingly titled For the Common Good, Shorten confesses: “I still think like an organiser.” No one can complain they weren’t warned.

Shorten is a union organiser to his bootstraps. And the rest of us will pay the Bill.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.