Business too lazy to go in to bat

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This was published 12 years ago

Business too lazy to go in to bat

Corporate leaders make fickle political bedfellows, and Abbott shouldn't expect their help to fight the carbon tax.

By Shaun Carney

Tony Abbott should prepare to be disappointed. Last week he implored the heads of mining companies to campaign against the Gillard government's planned carbon tax. He told them: ''Ladies and gentlemen, I know none of you like being political activists. But I say to you that at this time you need to become political activists - at least for a few months, at least for a couple of years.'' Abbott's advice to the members of the Minerals Council on the carbon tax was simple. ''You can't fix it,'' he said. ''You must fight it.''

It's not hard to understand what tempted the Liberal leader to become an urger. This time last year, the mining companies were orchestrating a powerful and effective advertising campaign against the Rudd government's resources rent tax, working in lock-step with Abbott to decry the ''great big new tax on everything''. They succeeded in smashing the tax and helped to end Kevin Rudd's prime ministership into the bargain.

Cartoon by Andrew Dyson .

Cartoon by Andrew Dyson .Credit: Andrew Dyson

Already feeling that he has the wind at his back on the issue, why wouldn't Abbott want a repeat of the mining companies' 2010 campaign, with its saturation advertising and threats of a capital strike? The problem is, when it comes to affecting public opinion, lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice. And while it's true that the mining sector is fabulously cashed up and more overt in its willingness to influence government decision-making and political debate, business leaders can make for unreliable campaigners.

In what seems several lifetimes ago, I was the industrial relations reporter for what is now the Herald Sun. Away from the industrial tribunals and the microphones, those brave souls whose job it was to represent employers in negotiations and wage hearings would tell a tale of habitual frustration.

It went like this: bosses wanted their industry bodies to talk tough and take a hard line but reserved the right to do deals with unions and employees when the going got rough. Their rationale was simple - they were there to make a dollar, not become martyrs.

Those were days when industrial relations laws were more centralised, but times haven't changed that much. Consider the long gestation and short life of WorkChoices. Responding to years of urging by business heads to do something meaningful about union power, John Howard announced WorkChoices in 2005. The law came into force in 2006, as the ACTU's community and media campaign against it started to grab the public imagination.

The business sector, having got what many of its leading lights had been asking for, sat on its hands at first. Eventually it responded with its own half-hearted, underfunded ad campaign in response to the ACTU's superior, devastating effort. It left it up to the Howard government, underwritten by the taxpayer, to carry the message. By May 2007, under pressure, Howard rolled back the policy to little avail, and the Labor Party won office six months later with a pledge to bury WorkChoices.

During the same period, business leaders were giving another issue political ballast. The move for climate change action really got going on an apparently bipartisan basis in 2006 after big business started agitating for the Howard government to provide ''certainty'' on the issue.

This resulted in Howard directing his department head, Peter Shergold, to produce a policy road map on climate change. Several months out from the 2007 election, Shergold proposed an emissions trading scheme, which Howard adopted as Coalition policy. It did not help Howard politically, and possibly even damaged him because many swinging voters saw it as a cynical move, given that back then polls suggested a strong majority of people wanted action on climate change. The eventual result was the multi-car pile-up known as the carbon pollution reduction scheme.

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Now it's Labor's turn to take corporate advice. In September last year, with the ALP having only just clung to office, one of the leading figures of the Australian business community reignited the climate change policy debate. A month after the 2010 election, the chief executive of BHP Billiton, Marius Kloppers, called for the Gillard government to move early on setting a price on carbon emissions because countries that moved first would have an international advantage.

He proposed an emissions trading scheme for power stations and a carbon tax for the remainder of the economy, except for transport, agriculture and export industries. The chairman of the retailing and agriculture giant Wesfarmers, Bob Every, also publicly supported a carbon tax.

Julia Gillard took this as encouragement for comprehensive reform. But a few weeks ago, less than eight months after Kloppers' intervention, the chairman of BHP Billiton, Jac Nasser, seemed to be singing a serious rearrangement of Kloppers' tune. He advised Gillard to take a ''go-slow approach'', dealing with carbon emissions sector by sector, which would be better than a single tool such as a carbon tax. Nasser also said the rest of the world would not take particular notice of whatever Australia did.

Not exactly all shoulders to the wheel, was it? In response to Abbott's imprecations last week, Minerals Council chairman Peter Johnston said ''most mining companies would rather tackle the policy as an issue … than be political activists''. Given some of the results, that's probably just as well.

Shaun Carney is an associate editor of The Age.

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