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Big business launches pro-IR law ads
Topic Started: Feb 8 2009, 12:23 PM (56 Views)
Warren
Administrator
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Big business launches pro-IR law ads

By Brad Norington

August 09, 2007 12:00am
Article from: The Australian

BIG business has taken the unprecedented step of direct intervention in the federal election campaign with expensive advertisements warning of danger to the economy if the Howard Government's workplace laws are dismantled.

Just months before John Howard is expected to call the election, a coalition of 19 business groups launched a multi-million-dollar advertising campaign yesterday under the banner "Let's keep workplace reform".

Business Council of Australia president Michael Chaney insisted the ads were not "party political" and did nothing more than what businesses believed was good economic policy.

But the ads, which began airing on prime time TV last night, are pitched at countering an ACTU ad message that the Government's laws are unfair and should be overturned, as proposed by federal Labor under Kevin Rudd.

The reluctance of key employer organisations including the Australian Industry Group, the Master Builders Association and the National Farmers Federation to join the campaign yesterday indicates some reservations about the political nature of the ads.

The ads carry the message "If it ain't broke don't fix it" and proclaim the benefits of workplace reform.

They will also be aired in newspapers and on billboards, but will be withdrawn when the election is officially announced, expected to be in September or October.

While declaring the ads focused on policy, not politics, Mr Chaney, who is also NAB chairman and formerly Wesfarmers chief executive, said: "There is a great consequence - a risk we should not be willing to take - in unravelling those reforms and returning our industrial relations laws back to something similar to what we had in the 1970s and 1980s.

"They were the final, dark days of an industrial relations system designed in 1904."

While not naming Labor, which plans to dump the Howard government laws and introduce its own more union-friendly brand, the TV ads warn against the risk of winding back existing laws and carry an overt message about unions. "Gone out of business because of union bosses," is daubed in white paint in one scene.

Mr Chaney was joined in Sydney yesterday to launch the ads by Charlie Lenegan, chief executive of mining company Rio Tinto, and Tony Howarth, vice-president of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The business groups defended the use of Crosby Textor, the Liberal Party's pollsters, to devise the ads, saying the agency had been used over the years and proved "good at getting a complicated message across".

ACTU president Sharan Burrow immediately attacked the ads, claiming they were "just an exercise in naked self-interest" after record profits and high executive salaries.

Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey said the ACTU's ads were misleading.

Labor Opposition industrial relations spokeswoman Julia Gillard said the new ads were a matter for the business community.
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