Here’s an elaborate conspiracy theory. In a dark corner of a scungy pub in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville, socialist double agent Alan Joyce is downing schooners of Tooheys New with Transport Minister and Left faction operative Anthony Albanese as they toast their collective success in making Labor relevant again.
Fifth columnist…Alan Joyce addresses the 4th International in Minsk. Photo: James Croucher
The Qantas chief executive may have unwittingly done more than anyone to get the Labor Party off the mat by bringing on a massive, nation-stopping industrial brawl which let the ALP remind the voters exactly what it stood for.
For many voters, that’s not necessarily a positive thing. In the minds of many people Julia Gillard’s handling of the Qantas dispute will have only reinforced their view that Labor remains the captive of union self-interest in an age when a minority of Australian workers is unionised. These people aren’t going to vote Labor anyway.
For others – traditional Labor voters who have drifted to the Greens, swinging lower and middle-income voters who felt Labor had forgotten them, or was simply just a hopeless, dithering mess – the Government response to the Qantas dispute seems to have played favourably to their sense of the fair go.
The concept of the fair go is an evocative and almost sacred sentiment in Australia. It might often be sentimental and cliched but it is still central to our shorthand description of our national identity.
However obstructionist and reckless the unions in the Qantas dispute might have been, there is still a very clear sentiment in the community – possibly majority sentiment – that Alan Joyce went too far.
A couple of weeks ago I knocked out a column saying that Joyce was well within his rights to exert his authority as a manager, and that I’d much rather fly with an airline that was managed by a CEO with his nouse, acumen and experience, than by a rabbit like Tony Sheldon from the Transport Workers Union.
The column however noted that there were three major PR errors Joyce and Qantas had made – the CEO’s decision to accept a whopping $2 million, 71 per cent pay rise just days before the dispute; the decision to ground the planes with no forewarning to the 60,000 affected passengers, and the failure to prosecute the fullest possible case outlining the unions’ pig-headedness.
Because of all this many people concluded that, however bad the unions were, Joyce and Qantas had failed the fair go test. The company’s top-shelf grovel to passengers with reimbursements and frequent flyer point giveaways is an admission of sorts that the company itself now recognises this.
The fascinating feature of Labor’s response to the dispute was that, for almost two years, Labor has not had a successful and instinctive response to anything. Under Kevin Rudd the party lurched back and forth, and from left to right, on everything from border protection to climate change. It looked dithering, gutless, vacuous, confused, unreliable, and it has only got worse under Julia Gillard and the new paradigm, as every decision she has made has been done with one eye on Caucus and the other on the gaggle of Greens and independents she relies upon to prop up her fragile government.
The Qantas dispute was the first time in a long time where Labor ran on instinctive gut reaction to a massive issue. Gillard’s language, in labelling Qantas’ actions “extreme”, was comparatively measured against the many other Labor MPs who were immediately and loudly out of the blocks, in full 2007 Workchoices mode, saying that it was basically a dog act to lock out all of your staff when only some of them had been involved in the stoppages, or only the most minor forms of trouble-making such as pilots wearing red ties.
Labor’s gut-reaction decision to hop into the flying kangaroo was in step with a lot of mainstream sentiment. Labor MPs have absolutely loved the chance to run a line which is based on their most basic values, the beliefs which made them join the party in the first place. As a result the biggest political problem with the Qantas dispute has ended up residing not with the Labor Party but the Coalition, whose MPs are being forced to suppress or ignore their own beliefs and values on this crucial issue. .
The polls still show that, in terms of the party vote, Labor would get clobbered by the Coalition. But the margin has narrowed, and more tellingly, Tony Abbott’s disapproval rating has been going up and up, to a truly alarming and record 57 per cent.
It has been written elsewhere this week in analysis of Newspoll, most authoritatively by Paul Kelly in The Australian, that Abbott is clearly paying the price for running such a negative line on pretty much everything. No longer is he known as the Mad Monk, but as Doctor No. The whole country knows what Tony Abbott is against. He is against the pokie tax, he is against the carbon tax, he is against the mining tax, he is against the flood levy, he is against the Malaysian solution. No-one really knows what he is for. His vague refrain that it is the job of government “to do no harm” might go over well with the wild-eyed libertarian crowd but it doesn’t cut it with voters who still see a role for government, and want to know what role that would be under Abbott’s prime ministership.
The Qantas dispute placed the Coalition under intense pressure to show its hand on industrial relations. Abbott failed to explain anything. He has gone from being a supporter in government of the Coalition smashing the MUA and introducing Workchoices to, in opposition, signing gimmicky pledges saying Workchoices is “dead, buried, cremated” and offering no new detail since, not even with an entire airline grounded and an entire workforce facing a lock-out.
If Abbott is not going to stand for anything he is going to be vulnerable to accusations that he secretly stands for sinister things. Labor has often used shameless scare tactics on IR to frighten people out of voting for the Coalition. The way Tony Abbott keeps ducking this issue, the Coalition will end up doing a good enough job of scaring people on its own, and the ALP won’t need to pay for those scary adverts at the next election, and will be free to spend its cash on more celebratory beers for comrade Alan Joyce.
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