3 months ago
16
Greetings comrades. Having spent my weekend at the Victorian State Labor Conference, I feel suitably re-educated to talk to you about something peculiar going on within our great and glorious movement.
Comrades, has it ever struck you as passingly strange that, for all the things we could be doing in a state where we have been in government 21 of the past 25 years, we spend an awful lot of time talking about the Liberal Party?
Premier Jacinta Allan is applauded after speaking at the Victoria Labor State Conference at Moonee Valley Racecourse this week.Credit: Eddie Jim
I say this as a registered observer at the conference, rather than a member of our great and glorious movement, so you will forgive me for not recognising the real and present danger the Liberals represent – with their 20 members in an 88-seat Legislative Assembly – to the rights and lives of working people.
But from my cordoned-off position at the back of the room, where delegates are free to approach the journalists as long as they don’t feed them, the constant references to what the Liberals did in the 1990s or didn’t do in the single term they governed this century seemed a little over-egged.
This is what our Dear Leader, Jacinta Allan, told us in her speech: “Never forget, the Tories have already had their turn and they didn’t just sit on their hands – they swung the axe. They shut TAFE campuses (Shame!) and locked young people out. They closed hospitals (Shame!) and made families travel longer. They cut schools and then asked why kids were falling behind. They sold off the SEC (Shame!) and my dad lost his job.
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“Deep down, they don’t believe working people deserve better.”
They sound awful. I’m glad the SEC is back in business, enshrined in the Constitution and, no doubt, employing all those workers again. The Latrobe Valley must be rocking these days. But when you say the Tories have had their turn, are we still talking about 1993?
Another thing, comrades. All this stuff about bosses darkly plotting against the interests of the workers they employ – does anyone really believe it?
When the Dear Leader talked about “bosses who think being seen at a desk is more important than a parent getting home for dinner with their kids”, is she borrowing from Dickens or suggesting this is going on now, in hot-desking, fitball offices across Melbourne, with sparkling water on tap?
For the sake of little Timmy, we should really do something about it.
One thing I will credit the Dear Leader for (among the other great and glorious gifts she has given working people such as freeing us from the tyranny of Commonwealth Games swimming) is that her speech went some way to explaining why every worker shall be given the right to labour two days a week from the petty bourgeois comfort of their own home office.
When the premier announced her Two-Day Plan, it was not immediately clear what problem she was promising to solve.
Since the pandemic, when the previous Dearest of Leaders gave us four reasons to leave our front door, working from home has become widely accepted practice. There isn’t evidence of a concerted push by big employers to bring workers back to the office five days a week, and if workers and their bosses can’t agree on what is reasonable, there are provisions in federal workplace law to resolve disputes.
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As the premier said, working from home is something that good workplaces – and, dare we say, good bosses – already support.
It is also not clear whether Victoria, having in 1996 ceded to the Commonwealth its power to make industrial laws – when the Tories were having their turn – can lawfully mandate where people log on to work.
The more that Comrade Allan talked about the need to give workers greater protection against the rapacious instincts of evil Tories and all those Ebenezer bosses out there, the more it became clear what this is really about.
Her promise to legislate work-from-home laws, like much of the Labor State Conference, is less concerned with what a Labor government can do than convincing people what a Liberal government could do. If you can’t quite picture what a Victorian Liberal government looks like, there is diorama of one on display in the Melbourne Museum.
Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV as Ivan Drago.
During a lull in conference debate, a senior comrade helpfully explained the government’s biggest problem is not its lamentable financial management of the state nor the mountainous debt it has accumulated, but the absence of a proper opposition to frame next November’s electoral contest.
Since the Liberal Party, after 11 years in opposition, stubbornly refuses to put itself forward as a viable, alterative government, Labor has no choice but to confect one, complete with a range of fictional policies, so it has something to fight against.
By the time Labor machine is finished touching up Brad Battin, the opposition leader will look as menacing as Rocky’s nemesis, Ivan Drago.
There is a certain genius at work here. To call it a mere scare campaign sells short the cynical artistry of legislating to protect something not at risk, from people who aren’t planning to get rid of it, so that voters will reward with another four years in office a government so accustomed to power it no longer knows what to do with it.
Comrades, thank you for welcoming me to your conference. It is inspiring to see democracy at work. But I ask respectfully, when you joined this great and glorious movement, was fighting for Zoom meetings what you had in mind?
Chip Le Grand is state political editor.
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