Liberals: saving the bite for later

By Jennifer Thompson
The federal Liberal Party's election campaign has begun with John Howard delivering two of six "headland" speeches and launching an attack on Labor's economic management. But despite Howard's attempt at image softening, it's clear that he intends to continue with Labor's attacks on living standards. The Liberals have gone to great lengths to avoid spelling out any policy detail, preferring instead to talk about the things they won't do. These include policies that cost them the 1993 election such as the GST and abolition of Medicare bulk billing.
Cuts are nothing new to Australians after 13 years of federal Labor's cuts to wages and social spending. With their labour market "reform" program, however, a Liberal government will speed up and deepen that process.
Howard has seized on the May current account deficit blow out as evidence of Labor's economic ineptitude. But the Liberal's policy — a version of Labor's — is to heighten productivity in order to improve Australian capital's ability to compete internationally. Their targeting the labour market disproves the idea that all Australians benefit from continual productivity gains.
Enterprise bargaining is the mechanism by which both major parties mean to extract these gains. Labor's version has the trade union leadership, the ACTU, negotiating and selling enterprise bargains to workers. Currently, unions still have the right to strike during bargaining, although non-union enterprise agreements are also allowed.
The Liberals want to curtail the role of unions. "We need to reduce the unwanted and uninvited intervention of unions and the Industrial Relations Commission", said Peter Reith, the Liberal's industrial relations spokesperson.
For the moment, however, the federal Liberal Party has pulled back from directly confronting the unions. This is in response to big business concerns that industrial relations programs like those of the WA Liberal government are a recipe for rising industrial disputation rather than reducing disputes and union membership and increasing labour productivity.
Writing in the July 19 Financial Review, Peter Roberts put it more bluntly: "Howard attacks the big amalgamated unions, but it is these that have been training their organisers and shop stewards to take part in company improvement processes ... Without too much provocation they could refocus their agenda to one of defending wages and conditions."
The federal Liberals have taken this warning on board. They nevertheless remain committed to a productivity commission which would be given "full authority to examine restrictive labour practices that retard productivity". They also plan to reduce the award safety net to a bare minimum and to undermine traditional union coverage, pushing the divisive notion of workers shopping around for union representation like any other "service".
The Liberal's "family package" is also linked to generalising enterprise bargaining. Much has been made of the so-called flexibility in work conditions when workers move out of the award system. This "flexibility", along with tax and superannuation concessions in favour of single income families, aims to benefit the traditional family set-up. For many workers however, flexibility in working conditions actually serves employers' operational needs and undermines award entitlements like penalty rates and shift allowances.
Reith has recently pushed enterprise bargaining, citing unpublished research on wages growth in WA to argue that it will deliver wage rises not available through the award system. This is not surprising given that both major parties see the award system as — at best — secondary to enterprise bargaining. The now famed "five minutes of sunshine" may also be responsible for any gains in wage rates, but these are likely to be short lived as the economic "recovery".
The Liberal's other major policy direction, revealed in the headland sketches, is the promise of severe fiscal tightening.
In promising big business a surplus budget, Howard is promising us billions of dollars of cuts to social spending. This is despite a recent Bulletin Morgan poll which indicated the three highest voter concerns as: the standard of health care and hospitals; the standard of education and the level of unemployment. The Liberals are delaying any mention of what specifically they plan to cut, saving the bite for later.
However, Howard has indicated his intention to privatise Telstra (formerly Telecom). While Keating has vowed to keep it publicly owned, the community service obligations of Telstra are already being undermined through its corporatisation, the usual prelude to privatisation. When privatisation takes place, any surviving commitment to non-profitable community services will be lost, along with a great number of jobs.
Between Keating's vows and Howard's intentions, it is clear that we can't expect much joy from either at the next elections it's a choice between bad and worse.