By Denis Bright
A century after that prior attempt at Return to Normalcy in the wake of the Spanish flu pandemic and the burdens imposed by the Great War (1914-18), political elites are about to steer a new exercise in the economics of corporate modernism.
Perhaps the challenges were greater a century ago. There were an estimated 15,000 deaths from the Spanish flu pandemic in Australia and 60,000 war fatalities in a national population of less than 6 million. Still, there are real challenges associated with the federal LNPs rhetorical plan for the future. You’re welcome to grasp the embedded political agenda from the LNP’s site.
The conservative Nationalist Coalitions of the 1920s offered no real plans for economic and social recovery from the challenges of those difficult times. In juxtaposition, the post-war recovery in the post-1945 era which delivered a national unemployment rate below 2 per cent for the next thirty years with the exception of temporary recessions on the LNP’s watch in 1953 and 1961. Even in those worst years, unemployment was still below 3 per cent (Labor History No.108-May 2015). The Arab oil crisis followed in the mid-1970s and the tolerable unemployment rate doubled to 6 per cent in mainstream media reports which were not qualified by any explanation of the social reality of the employment data being transmitted.
Work Practices in the Gig Economy
In today’s gig economy, the Morrison Government will return to corporate-led recovery after 31 March 2021 when JobKeeper and JobSeeker will be scaled back as promised as resources are directed in the federal budget (likely on 11 May 2021) to business and investor sectors which are the key LNP support bases.
On the surface, economic trends are promising. Eyewitness news reports focus on the well-publicized unemployment rate of 6.4 per cent in January 2021. This good news must be tempered by an ABS criterion that defines employment as one hour or more a week for each reference week in the monthly employment surveys.
Underemployment is a big qualifying factor in the ABS data released on 18 February 2021. The underemployment rate is currently over 8 per cent of the workforce.
The growth of independent contracting is staggering. It represents another 8.2 per cent of all employment.
As a bicycle rider, I often whisk past independent contractors waiting at food outlets to deliver fast food for a few dollars a time is revolting sight. Such legalized practices are returning society to the piecework era offered in the early phases of the industrial revolution in Britain which is now is dire straits after BREXIT and a badly managed COVID-crisis.
By coincidence, I enjoyed a travel documentary on life in Cornwall in Britain’s new gig economy where wealth accumulates across an immense social divide. Young entrepreneurs offering food services to beach goers from mobile vans live out of cars and caravans on windswept frosty moorlands to escape unaffordable rentals in England’s surfing paradise. This is social reality in Cornwall’s post-tin and clay mining booms. The documentary is available on YouTube.
Inappropriate employment vetting is widening the wage divide in both private and government sectors (ABC News, 13 July 2019 by Laura Tingle):
The Herald Sun reported this week that two staffers wanting to work for federal ministers failed high-level security checks and that more than 90 people looking for jobs in the Australian Public Service had been denied security clearances in the past four years.
“The vetting process, aimed at catching foreign spies and people vulnerable to blackmail and coercion, has been criticised over a backlog of cases, delays of more than a year and the use of private contractors,” the paper reported.
Yet if one of those people then decided to run for Parliament, there would be no formal process that stopped them, other than perhaps a quiet word from security agencies to political parties that their candidates might pose exactly the sort of risk section 44 is supposed to deal with.
And the rules apply differently to politicians when it comes to leaking things, too.
A battery of corporate vetting agencies has been fostered by the federal LNP to assist in maintaining a docile non-unionized workforce.
The corporate firm Intelligence Studio boasts of its capacity to delve into the private lives of wage-earners with a range of legitimate and less orthodox checks.
Open Source and Social Media Presence – A ‘deep dive’ is conducted of the world wide web and also social media platforms. This data is accessible by anyone including your competitors, investors, and customers therefore we will conduct pre-emptive searches to identify any adverse intelligence the applicant may bring to your company and also give you further insight into the applicant’s associations, habits, interests and activities.
I would recommend that readers take up offers to have taxpayer funded coffee and drinks with federal LNP members which are commencing a through mobile offices so that MPs are actually away of the return to dire straits on the labour market. I took the opportunity this weekend and was pleased to meet and greet with an affable LNP member who took notes of my concerns but was completely unaware of the extent of employment vetting in both private and public sectors.
Both of my parents suffered from employment vetting in the interwar period when gaining a permanent job was always difficult. This might appear to be a repetitive reference (AIM Network, 20 May 2020) but I am fairly confident that subterranean and sectarian employment vetting sill operated under the Bjelke-Petersen National Party Government in Queensland until the 1980s and perhaps beyond when I recall the promotion trails of some of my teaching colleagues. Employment rights continue to be eroded in more subtle manners through contemporary employment vetting.
Challenges of Non-Unionized Workplaces
Such background checks have the capacity to discourage trade union membership.
This screening activity means more profits for employers as shown by the variation in incomes for unionized and non-unionized employees in the median weekly earning data.
There are alternatives to sustainable investment creation through the initiatives of the RBA, the Future Fund, state and territory based investment funds and overseas investment.
Australia has significant deposits ($5A billion) in the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) from Tony Abbott’s time as prime minister which could be used to promote Belt and Road Projects in Northern Australia in particular to build up Darwin as a key export terminal with supportive transport links and processing plants for food and resource exports.
Such initiatives would bypass the environmentally sensitive use of Coral Sea industrial and coal export terminals while coking coal exports are still a player in the Australian export economy for the next decade at least.
It is the Labor Party which can from a majority government to implement a more inclusive plan for the future.
Following negative reactions to the Green’s Caravan to once marginal electorates like Capricornia and Flynn just prior to the 2019 federal elections, there will be some reappraisal of the value of campaigning against coking coal exports until more sustainable energy policies are up and running under a future Labor Government with commitments to electric cars, hydrogen fuels and a more rounded commitment to alternative energy and sustainable cities.
Possibilities for Consensus-Building
The success of Premier Palaszczuk’s state election campaign in 2020 does suggest that co-operation can be forged between traditionally rival sections of the Labor Party’s trade union support base to deliver a better range of environmental, community and infrastructure outcomes which are needed in the electorate. This was indeed the essence of the pre-1957 style of politics in Queensland which kept Labor in office for forty years after 1915 with the exception of the disastrous single term of the Moore Government (1929-32).
Behind the scenes changes in Labor’s factional re-alignment are indeed a sensitive issue with both Labor insiders and members of environmental networks. While this article by Hayden Johnson has its limitations, it is to be commended for raising an important issue for discussion.
Critical journalists should be sensitive to the extent of subterranean politics between political elites. Both helpful comments and refusals to comment are all significant. I have sought comments from within the trade union movement and from environmental networks with mixed success in terms of access to information and respect for the genuine inquiry processes which are at the heart of investigative journalism.
As media adviser at the Australian Conservation Foundation in Melbourne, Josh Meadows offered a helpful commitment to a sustainable jobs agenda and instantly understood the value of the phone inquiry (Authorized Quote from the ACF):
ACF is certainly aware of the importance of combining job generation with environmental protection.
In September 2020 ACF released a report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) setting out how Gladstone can build on its success as an industrial and export centre to become a renewable energy powered hub for industries like aluminium, steel, cement and hydrogen.
Meanwhile, the cross the board consensus which saw the Palaszczuk Government comfortably re-elected on 31 October 2020 can be applied to a dozen or so Queensland federal seats which are currently help by the LNP.
A more broadly based Labor Movement through factional realignment has real potential to take Australians out of the excesses of the Gig economy without more corporate intrusions into the private lives of employees as advocated by Intelligence Studio to offer a more docile compliant workforce in which wealth accumulates and social democracy suffers more injustices (Image: Intelligence Studio):
It has been a rough week for the federal LNP. Its support for vetting of lowly employees contrasts with permissiveness in the corridors of power and influence.
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