It looks increasingly likely that the Labor government will fall because of the sordid dealings of Health Services Union officials – in the words of HSU national secretary Kathy Jackson, a “total betrayal” of all health workers, including large numbers of staff in aged-care and other health facilities that she classifies as “working poor”.
Whether or not allegations against NSW central coast MP Craig Thomson prove to be true – including new allegations published in News Ltd papers that phone calls were made from Thomson’s hotel rooms to escort services – the evidence made public points clearly to the fact that officials pledged to improving the lot of many of society’s least empowered individuals chose instead to throw away hard-earned union fees on their own opulent debauchery.
Whoever did this will already know that they have most likely, with the zip of a fly-fastener, stopped Labor’s reform agenda dead in its tracks and brought shame on the very idea of besuited unionists taking money from blue-collar workers in the name of ‘representation’.
The HSU is in major damage control – Jackson appeared on the ABC’s Lateline program last night to explain that she has played this now two-year-old scandal by the book, requesting and tracking the progress of a Fair Work Australia inquiry into just who paid for prostitutes with union credit cards.
Her frustration is that following due process had led nowhere, which is why the union is now handing its files, including its own internal investigation, over to police.
Under close questioning from the ABC’s Tony Jones, Jackson stopped short of saying she had made a “complaint” to police, but she was forced to concede that whoever had used the cards in this way had committed a criminal act.
Night after night, Labor’s top political operatives will be focusing their attention on raking through all the details, all the evidence, searching for a credible political defence. But if Thomson was not the perpetrator (and that is for the police, Fair Work Australia, and potentially for the courts to decide), these crimes occurred on his watch as HSU national secretary.
So a minority government hitting record lows in the polls will, either way, carry with it the stench of vice and the betrayal of the working poor as well. That ain’t going to produce a poll spike.
A resolution to this crisis does not look far off – the HSU has challenged Thomson to restate his claims of innocence for the public record. This must be done in parliament. Telling reporters in parliament house corridors that he stands by his former statements is not enough – besides, an innocent man has nothing to fear in standing up in parliament and telling the truth.
The tragedy of a government unravelling in this way is that it invites hubris and the lust for power in those as yet unready to govern. The Coalition has for months put forward nonsensical arguments in support of its planned budget cuts, its expensive and inefficient approach to carbon pricing, and has failed to address the difficult issues crimping Australian productivity – education and training, infrastructure and our dismal record on innovation – to instead focus on an as yet ill-defined and ideological assault on Labor’s IR policies.
If the government crumbles before the carbon tax and mining tax are legislated, then at least an Abbott-led government would be saved much of the legislative unravelling work it would otherwise have faced (not so the NBN, for which most of the enabling legislation is now passed and for which many of the key contracts have been signed).
Nonetheless, if Thomson is forced to resign and Labor loses his seat (a near certainty – it is held on a margin of 5.1%), Australians would again go to the polls – this time to replace a bungling Labor government with several major reforms in train (particularly its national health plan, the NBN, carbon pricing, the MRRT and its training and skilled migration revamp), with a government yet to outline any serious reform agenda at all.
The tragedy is that day by day, that is looking to be the better option.
This article first appeared on Business Spectator.
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