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POST WAR AUSTRALIA - IT'S NOT THE WIFE. IT'S THE PARTY, STUPID. |
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The
underpayment scandal around Ms Rein is not so much a gender issue as a
class question. And because it is a class issue, Gillard skates over the
mistreatment of Rein’s female employees. The femocrats on Rudd’s
front bench define equity as their right to expect a seat on the board
of McBank alongside Carr. They could not care less whether Rein
encourages her employees to join a union. The
focusing on the rights of a woman to grind the faces of her female
labour is one more sign of what has gone wrong both with the ALP and
with the women’s movement. That
the ALP’s leader’s wife runs a $180m. a year business should upset
labour stalwarts less than the nature of her business at WorkDirections.
Not so long ago, the ALP criticised the Coalition’s handing of
employment services to the Job Network. Did that trifle ever come up
around the Rudd meal table? The
IR police will have plenty of questions to pursue for their political
masters. Into what workplace conditions do Rein’s underpaid staff
place the unemployed? For instance, does her firm stitch job-seekers up
with AWAs? Has her partner checked out how Christian are the criteria on
which she decides which employers are fit to service? What
the Rein matter highlights is that to draft Rudd’s policy speech you
apply through McBank, not your nearest ALP branch. That situation is the
end product of policy purges and administrative debasement that have fed
each other to deliver an ex-Labor ex-Party. Before the 1980s, Labor
leaders sold out on a case-by-case basis. The Hawke-Keating governments
conducted a closing-down sale. Their changes have made it impossible for
Rudd to join the venerable tradition of Labor rats. There is nothing
left for him to rat from and nowhere different to rat to. Meanwhile,
the organisational wing became an ex-Party, its branches stacked with
ethnic gangs, its structures dominated by weathervane factions, and
local hopefuls over-ridden for celebrities as policy-free as the machine
that picks them. At least, the ALP’s refusal to restore compulsory
student unionism will choke off the sewer that flushed know-nothing
apparatchiks out of student politics and through trade union and
ministerial offices. The
past six months have witnessed a further mutation. The 21st
century IR policy of no strike-pay and one-strike-and-you’re-inside
revealed that the initials ALP now stand for Anti-labour Party. O brave ex-party that has such spouses lead it. |