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Are Liberal Party blue bloods sinking the Government’s workplace reforms?
Joe Cambria
My article the Liberal Party treats members with contempt exposed the disdain in which the party’s blue bloods hold ordinary members. Once again I was going to let the matter drop. Once again events forced me to return to the subject.
Earlier this year I asked Gerry Jackson, Brookes’ economics editor, what he thought would happen to the Government’s proposed labour market reforms. In his view the Government’s campaign would be a fiasco that as likely as not would turn into a political disaster. He gave two reasons for his bleak prediction.
The first one was that advocates of reform have zero historical perspective and even very little economic theory. The second one was that these self-appointed reformers have absolutely no understanding of the “fears and anxieties” that are most people’s lot in life. They lack “empathy”. At least the “unionocracy” has some understanding of how the mass of people feel, and this understanding will be successfully exploited against the Government.
On Sunday 30 October Gerry Jackson expressed the opinion that due to the incompetence of the party’s blue bloods Grant Belchamber, the ACTU’s chief research officer, “goes to bed every night laughing” (Liberal Party stuffs up its workplace reform arguments against the unions). Well, he now has a lot more to laugh about. The following morning The Australian published Ads succeed in scaring off the workers by Glenn Milne. It revealed not an impending disaster for the Liberal Party but a looming political calamity if the voting trends are not reversed.
In Milne’s own words: “The Government's obscene $40 million WorkChoices advertising campaign has disappeared up its own fundamentals”. Has it ever. The ACTU hired the highly experienced US national pollster Vic Fingerhut. His findings?
Despite the incredibly stupid headline in the Financial Review (IR bluster fails to rouse most voters) the figures show that your campaign has made an enormous impact.
These are powerful numbers. Thirty-five per cent (!!) of the electorate said they were less likely to vote for the Coalition in the next election because of the proposed IR changes. That’s a gigantic number.
The paper pooh-poohs the fact that only 20 per cent of respondents who voted for the Liberal Party or Nationals in 2004 said they are now less likely to vote for the Coalition because of the Government’s approach to industrial relations.
The poll shows that you’ve increased the proportion of voters who saw the issue as important to 49 per cent of the electorate and Labor is now seen as best to handle the issue by a 24 point, 50-26 point margin.
Also, you've hit one of the key target audiences [the $50-$75,000 income range] with a full 40 per cent saying they are now less likely to vote Coalition as a result of its planned workplace changes.
These are great numbers. Very few independent media campaigns –– anywhere –– do this much damage.
These findings are absolutely devastating for the Government and its advisers, and must surely be cause for considerable alarm among Coalition MPs and Senators. (Does anyone remember the seat of Bruce?) How did the Government get itself into this almighty bind? I have no hesitation in pointing the finger at the Party’s blue bloods, the self-anointed political aristocracy consisting of the likes of Morgan, the Krogers and Calvert-Jones.
Friends of mine in the City have complained for years about Michael Kroger, Morgan and Calvert-Jones picking incompetent advisers and funding self-important twits. And what has been the result of their activities? Australia’s “minimum wage is 58 per cent of the median wage”. That –– believe it or not –– is it!
Morgan goes on Lateline (ABC 10 August 2005) and tells Maxine McKew that the minimum wage is “58 per cent of the median pay packet”. And that was basically the sum total of his argument. What is even worse is that this character actually seems to think that this is all he has to say to win the debate.
(And by the way, I am not the only one to notice how rich it is for a multimillionaire who lives in a Toorak mansion to go on TV and tell people on the minimum wage that they are overpaid. Talk about bad form as well bad tactics).
It apparently never occurred to Morgan that this figure is a completely meaningless statistic, unless someone has conned him into believing it expresses an economic law of some sort. And Morgan is not the only one to fall for this furphy. In No job? No cash? Sod off (The Australian, 29 October 2005) Christopher Pearson also thoughtlessly quoted this figure. And Morgan and Pearson are not the only ones who seem to think that this figure has magical powers.
Years of spending God only knows how much money and all this lot can up with is “58 per cent of the median pay packet”. If I didn’t know better I would say that this is unbelievable. To make the situation even worse, friends have told me that Morgan was instrumental in persuading the BCA to spend $6 million on ads defending labour market reform. This beggars belief. Does this lot really think that ads paid for by bosses are going to swing the mass of employees behind the Government’s reform package? They must be delusional. If anything this tactic will probably play into the gleeful hands of the ACTU. As Stuart Wilson of The Australian pointed out:
Members of the BCA are among the most highly paid individuals in the country, and this advertising campaign has the real potential to make debate on workplace reforms even more polarised between the haves and have-nots. (BCA on the right road but getting sidetracked by tax, 1 November)
I’m going to pinch a very insightful quote from one of Gerry Jackson’s articles. Professor Ludwig von Mises observed that
…men cannot succeed in adjusting social conditions to their plans if they do not convince public opinion. (Human Action, Henry Regnery Company, Chicago, 1963 edition).
Gerry Jackson is the only person I know of that had the insight to note that labour market reform is ultimately based on two competing theories of wage rate determination –– indeterminacy versus determinacy. From this observation he drew the necessary ramifications. And what do those intellects Hugh Morgan, Michael Kroger and Julian Sheezel have to say on this point? Get lost, even though Gerry Jackson has shown beyond a reasonable doubt that the union case for hampered labour markets has been thoroughly refuted by history and economics.
It is indisputable that the Liberal Party’s aristocracy has made no serious attempt to persuade the public of the benefits of labour market reform. Hell, this lot did not even bother to try and educate themselves on this matter. If they were genuinely concerned with reform they would have taken steps to provide every Liberal Party branch in the country with the necessary information to defend the Government’s labour market policy. They did absolutely nothing.
Is it any wonder that they treat ordinary Party members with such contempt3? Even then they screw up. Julian Sheezel (there is something almost Dickensian about his name) patronisingly told Gerry Jackson, who has forgotten more about labour markets than this lot could ever possibly know, that one must be an “important and influential figure” for the LSG (Liberal Speakers’ Group) to acknowledge you.
Yet Sheezel, who is State Director of the Victorian Liberal Party, authorised a statement declaring that the
LSG was set up in the 1950s as a “forum for Party members to discuss political issues of the day”. No where does the statement say anything about anyone having to be an “important and influential figure” in order to address the forum.
I’m not calling Sheezel a liar –– I wouldn’t dream of giving him that much credit: I am just exposing his incompetence and the arrogance of the likes of Kroger who have decided to change the rules to bloody well suit themselves and their little mates. And why? Because according to Kroger and Sheezel and their buddies the little people, those evident nuisances, have nothing of value to contribute to the Party, unlike the scintillating Hugh Morgan and the ever brilliant John Calvert-Jones.
A Party member makes a highly valuable contribution to the labour market reform ‘debate’ and all Julian Sheezel can do is insult him because he is not an “important and influential figure”. But when Steve Mayne complained that he had been insulted by the Liberal Party Sheezel immediately hit the phone and made a grovelling apology.
For those of you with a short memory, Mayne was Kennett’s press secretary who stabbed him in the back. He then set up Crikey which publishes a great deal of anti-Howard nonsense. And yet here we have Sheezel licking the man’s boots. And friends ask me why this lot have not one a single state election since 1997.
With arrogant economic illiterates like Kroger and his “little sock puppet”, as Sheezel is called by some Party members, running the show how could labour market reform possibly succeed in winning public support?
As a practising Catholic I sincerely believe in redemption. But without humility there can be no redemption. And all I see here is hubris.
Joe Cambria was a Wall Street trader for 18 years and can be contacted at joecambria@optusnet.com.au
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 7 November 2005