Jobless queues beckon for workers who vote Labor

Surely no CFMEU member wanting to stay employed can vote for Bill Shorten after the announcement of his energy policy last month. His exacting emissions reduction target would make their future only slightly less bleak than that of a Yuletide turkey.

Yet their union will be spending millions to bankroll Labor’s election campaign, thus hastening the prospect of redundancy. It is not exactly what unions were intended to do.

Shorten’s dream of reducing carbon emissions by 45 per cent in 12 years is an industrial-scale ­policy disaster, and the unions know it.

In May the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union wrote to the Queensland government warning that its 50 per cent renewable energy target was unrealistic.

Renewable energy was not yet cost effective, the union warned. The only way to power the country for now was with coal.

“They don’t realise there’s also a coalmine attached (to the power station) when they take those jobs out,” the CFMEU’s Shane Brunker told The Australian. “So these are regional communities that would be decimated.”

That Shorten should rank the pious concerns of the inner-city elite ahead of workers’ livelihoods will come as little surprise to anyone who has been following Labor politics for the past 35 years.

Bob Hawke’s decision to side with Bob Brown rather than Tasmanian workers by blocking the Franklin Dam set the pattern for the party’s shifting sympathies. The dam would have blessed Tasmania with abundant cheap energy, and carbon neutral at that. It would have encouraged investment and jobs in a state where they were much needed. Yet in the pursuit of metropolitan votes on the mainland, Labor consigned Tasmania to its fate.

Queensland, under Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, is in danger of becoming the new Tasmania. Indeed, if Richard Di Natale keeps his word, it will soon be the scene of Franklin-style protests as wild-eyed activists seek to earn a place in green heaven by lying in the path of Adani’s bulldozers.

Adani’s Carmichael coalmine is proceeding despite lukewarm support from both the Palaszczuk government and the federal opposition, which lacks the courage to resist a fashionable cause, however damaging it may be to the national economy. Shorten made his position on the Adani mine clear, sort of, in March when he told reporters: “I don’t support it because it doesn’t add up commercially or environmentally.”

Labor’s position was reinforced in September when its climate change spokesman Mark Butler, who hails incidentally from the wind and battery powered dystopia known as Adelaide, said: “I do not support opening new mines in the Galilee Basin, whether it’s by Adani, Clive Palmer or anybody else.”

Labor MPs and senators were reportedly told to say nothing about the Adani mine after the announcement last week that it was proceeding. Shorten refused to comment. There were suggestions that a factional deal had been reached to stop it blowing up before the election.

Labor’s indifference to the ­future of Australia’s largest export industry is a further sign of the party’s detachment from economic reality.

Shorten’s radical energy policy has ensured that the domestic coal market will shrink dramatically between now and 2030.

The closure of NSW’s Liddell power station in 2022 will be just the start. Simple mathematics suggests that as many as 10 of Australia’s 22 coal-fired power stations will have to close in 12 years to meet Shorten’s target.

The threat to CFMEU jobs extends beyond the energy sector. Construction is an energy-intensive industry responsible for 18 per cent of Australia’s carbon emissions. It will inevitably face tougher regulations and added costs once Shorten’s target is in place. The inevitable slowdown of the economy in general under a government with patent disregard for economic health will spell the end of the construction boom.

Wage inflation driven by Labor’s industrial relations policy will further dampen the demand for labour. Marginal developments will fall over, and those that stand up will employ fewer workers as developers turn to modular construction, prefabricated offshore.

The power of Labor’s reforms under the compact between government, business and trade unions in the 80s came from a shared self-interest in a strong, free-market economy. An act of economic self-harm as serious as this would never have left the whiteboard.

Today Labor, with its anchor trailing, has drifted into deep populist waters. There has been no cost-benefit analysis as far as we can tell, nor any consideration of the unintended consequences of deep market intervention.

In Labor circles, business is increasingly regarded as the enemy in a world divided starkly into good and evil. A 80s-style accord would be a pact with the devil.

The union movement’s concerns have changed as the fulcrum of power in the union movement moved from the blue-collar ranks to white-collar government employees.

Fewer than one in 10 private sector employees is a union member. Members in managerial and professional posts outnumber machinery operators and labourers four to one.

The majority of union members, frighteningly, have more to gain from a recession than they would lose, thanks to the expansion of government programs that would inevitably result.

The test will come at the ALP’s annual conference a week before Christmas. The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union has already voiced support for Shorten’s target, writing off the future of its members in aluminium smelting, whose jobs will be among the first to be sacrificed. The manufacturing sector’s decline will be hastened and operations with heavy labour costs will be the first to close.

If the CFMEU maintains silence, it will become clear that a deal has been struck. Labor’s industrial wing will be given the freedom it craves to bully, intimidate and extort, while the parliamentary wing would trash the economy by other means.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.