Business will keep paying for John Howard’s big IR mistake: Gottliebsen

John Howard was a good judge of Australian politics for decades. In his KGB interview he reveals two mistakes that have changed the face of Australia. One was made by himself and the other by Kevin Rudd.

Howard believes his mistake will prove to be a disaster for Australia, but the Rudd mistake (which cost Rudd his job as Prime Minister) may have been a national saviour because in Howard’s view Rudd “had absolutely no capacity to relate to his colleagues. He was a very, very, very bad listener”.

In my words, Howard was saying Rudd could not run a cabinet, which is an essential requirement of a Prime Minister.

Howard says he made a mistake getting get rid of the ‘no disadvantage test’ in his WorkChoices measures. However, he still believes that a national industrial relations system and the unfair dismissals rules were right.

That mistake played a big role in the defeat of Howard by Rudd and the roll back of the Howard IR legislation.

Howard believes the rollback is “very bad … We’re going to have a far more rigid system than a lot of people including some in the business community expect when a lot of agreements made under our laws run out”.

Business will find themselves, he says, “in the clutches of a more interventionist Fair Work Australia and they’ll have far less room to move and it’s going to be quite hard to remount that horse because of the numbers in the Senate”.

He adds: “Even if we were to win in 2013, it would be quite hard to change anything much.”

The KGB did not take the issue further during our interview, but in my view an early test of the significance of the Gillard IR changes will come from the Transport Workers Union push for a 16 per cent pay rise over three years.

In the pre-Howard years the TWU would seek big pay rises and the large transport companies would roll over. Because the TWU membership touches almost every sector of the country, under the old industrial relations system, the big transport wage increases then flowed to everyone. The Gillard system is likely to work the same way, which is exactly what is being tested now.

The second nation-changing mistake came when Kevin Rudd abandoned the emissions trading scheme.

Howard says that’s “the real story” of Rudd’s decline – Tony Abbott “spooked him”. When Abbott won the leadership of the Liberal Party he confronted Rudd on climate change. Rudd “panicked” and instead of having a double dissolution – which he would have won – he then proceeded to change his climate change position.

“That was absolutely fatal and that was the thing that really precipitated his poll slump and led to the mass exodus of inner city elites to the Greens. That’s the real story of what happened,” says Howard.

Nevertheless Howard believes that if Rudd had remained Prime Minister he would have beaten Tony Abbott.

Many in the Liberal Party believe the mass exodus from the ALP to the Greens will greatly damage the ALP and reduce it as a political force for a long time.
If that’s right, then the Rudd mistake, forced by Abbott, will change the nation – and not just in the short-term.

And on a personal note, Howard reveals that his incredible ability to remember names is a natural one. He does not study who is in the room. But he confesses that he does not have a good sense of direction.

This article first appeared on Business Spectator.