Australia\u2019s construction industry is hopelessly dysfunctional, damaged by \u2018disdain for the law\u2019 and \u2018frequent resort to practices of thuggery and physical coercion\u2019 which should not be tolerated for a minute.<\/p>\n
This is a clarion call for change!<\/p>\n
But this clarion call was made in August 1985 by then-Prime Minister Bob Hawke when he deregistered the Builders Labourers Federation.<\/p>\n
In 2024, the Albanese government said the same thing while putting the BLF\u2019s replacement, the CFMEU, into administration:<\/p>\n
\u2018There is no place for criminality or corruption in the construction industry, and bullying, thuggery, and intimidation are unacceptable in any workplace.\u2019<\/p>\n
Construction has been perhaps 40 per cent more expensive here than in comparable countries which means the Australian government has failed us.<\/p>\n
The \u2018thuggery\u2019 bargaining model has survived hostile legislation and all that the best advisors within government have thrown at it.<\/p>\n
I do not denigrate the Construction Commission repealed by the current government.\u00a0The current CFMEU Administrator is able, but surely must have the worst job in the world.\u00a0Although, that title may also have to go to those leading the Coalition after a terrifying election loss in 2025\u2026<\/p>\n
Since Covid, people have become accustomed to the presence of ever-increasing government benefits. The Albanese government promised benefits at the election in May and won.<\/p>\n
Up next is a \u2018Productivity Roundtable\u2019 to be held in August at which our budget extravagance and stalled productivity will supposedly be repaired.<\/p>\n
I myself attended 20 years of such Roundtables, most far more mundane, dealing with unfair dismissals and bargaining rules through to trade union finances. We attempted to stop the government from making the regulatory and cost environment of small, medium, and large businesses worse. In fact, we attempted to improve it. Sometimes with success.<\/p>\n
Many doubt this particular Roundtable will be successful, although the government may be better able to resist attacks than the Coalition was.<\/p>\n
In 2025, the Coalition did not have an effective story about our country to defend itself.<\/p>\n
The development of political party platforms was one of the key success stories of parliamentary democracy, emerging around the late 18th and early 19th centuries.<\/p>\n
Sir Robert Peel\u2019s Tamworth Manifesto of 1834 said that the British Conservative Party would correct \u2018proved abuses\u2019 and would \u2018review \u2026 institutions\u2019 combining a willingness to change with a traditional scepticism about government meddling.<\/p>\n
However, politics is more than a set of formal policies. It is as much theatre, which involves concealing the truth or just plain lying. The Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman, but a brutal realpolitik exercise in balancing all manner of hostile groups.<\/p>\n
There is no \u2018peace, order, and good government\u2019 in many countries despite these words in their constitutions.<\/p>\n
To be successful, the Coalition must be positive, standing for something that matters to voters, aspiration, lower taxes, smaller government, common sense, and definitely not lunacy. Don\u2019t let the government frame the Coalition as destroyers and extreme, even if \u2018community independents\u2019 tend to agree that they are.<\/p>\n
The major political parties should also work to recognise the success story of all Australians, including Australia\u2019s Aboriginal peoples, and British and modern multicultural immigrants.<\/p>\n
There is no reason but ideology to fight about it as we have been pointlessly doing for decades. To no result.<\/p>\n
The triumph of the Nomads, then the triumph of the pastoralists and the 1850s \u2018one man one vote\u2019 colonial democracies. A pioneer story. They, all together, built a remarkably successful and prosperous liberal democracy.<\/p>\n
One Geneva Academy estimate is that there are about 45 armed conflicts in Africa, 35 in the Middle East, and 21 in Asia.<\/p>\n
If you tell those suffering through these wars that in six years there will be stable and peaceful liberal democracy that would last without interruption for over 150 years, they would be incredulous. Yet that is the story of the colony of Victoria, established in 1851, and with \u2018one man one vote\u2019 in 1857.<\/p>\n
Aboriginal workers were part of nation-building. They were trackers to police, guides to early explorers, domestic help in rural and urban houses, shepherds of sheep and stockmen of cattle, whalers and sealers, as Ian McLean tells us.<\/p>\n
McLean says that while most early jobs were brawn rather than brain, \u2018the demand for skills in horsemanship and managing livestock rose, and there is evidence Aborigines possessed an aptitude for quickly acquiring these\u2019. There was \u2018dispossession\u2019 but also new \u2018opportunities for their employment in the economy of the Europeans previously only available to Aborigines located near the first coastal settlements\u2019. Rations were sought after.<\/p>\n
Aboriginal workers combined their traditional life with the new world of European labour requirements as stockmen, which often meant being absent from work. That was the uncontradicted evidence of the pastoralists during the 1966 Aboriginal Stockmen\u2019s Case.<\/p>\n
This positive message about Aboriginal nation building is a way forward, together with recognition of the obvious success of an 1850s democracy that deliberately extended the vote to all men, including Aboriginal and Chinese, and the pastoralists and their labourers who made us rich.<\/p>\n
Settler and Aboriginal relations were \u2018complex\u2019 and varied as Megan Davis and others have written. There was violence between Aborigines and pastoralists, and between Aboriginal tribes. There was terrible violence before Settlement in 1788. But you cannot just \u2018pick out the bad bits\u2019 of history to use Frank Bongiorno\u2019s phrase. Others will just point out the inadequacy of the story if you do.<\/p>\n
And we all today would be shocked if we visited the streets of London or New York in the 19th Century, let alone Cairo or Beijing, Timbuktu or Constantinople. Unguarded machines in factories. The legal systems were horrifying, even in London and New York, which had made great advances.<\/p>\n
Tarred heads of criminals were put on spikes on London Bridge until 1660. Criminals were hanged in public until 1868. People starved. Colonial Australia was a comparative success, iron manacles for convicts and the displacement and dispossession of First Nations people notwithstanding.<\/p>\n
By the Hon. Reg Hamilton, Adjunct Professor, School of Business and Law, Central Queensland University<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australia\u2019s construction industry is hopelessly dysfunctional, damaged by \u2018disdain for the law\u2019 and \u2018frequent resort to practices of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21037,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,9616,44],"class_list":{"0":"post-21036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-australia","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-flat-white","11":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}