verging_on_random

What happened to creeping socialism?

February 20, 2007 on 2:38 pm | In Uncategorized |

Night after night Alan Kohler announces that the stock market has closed at a record high. The prime minister and other conservative pollies boast that Australians have the highest rate of share ownership in the world, mainly through their membership of superannuation funds. Compulsory superannuation has been one of the outstanding success stories of the last 20 years, providing a forced saving mechanism that’s allowed consumers to go on a credit-fuelled rampage that would otherwise have sent the place broke.

It wasn’t meant to turn out this way. According to John Howard, by now we were supposed to be in the iron grip of socialism as trade unions took over every private company in the land using the massive resources of their superannuation funds.

A bit over 20 years ago the employer association that I worked for joined with the ACTU and the building unions in setting up the Building Unions Superannuation Scheme, the first national industry scheme of any size. The scheme’s called CBUS now. It has over $9 billion under management, consistently ranks amongst the best-performed funds in the country in terms of member returns and has never had a breath of scandal or improper practice associated with it, despite desperate efforts to find one on the part of the born to rule mob.

In 1983 I was ostracised by many employer association representatives for being part of this socialist initiative. When I became one of the foundation directors of the scheme I was barred from attending meetings at the Confederation of Australian Industry, for which I remain grateful to this day. The national director of my association was invited to a meeting with one of Bjelke-Petersen’s ministers under false pretences, and when he got there, subjected to ritual humiliation at the hands of the mental defectives who used to run the Queensland Confederation of Industry with the blessing of the Queensland government.

The then federal opposition ran a sustained campaign against what they dishonestly christened ‘union superannuation funds’, led by one John Winston Howard and his offsider, the execrable Richard Alston. They issued press releases and went to conferences and gave interviews in which they explained how union super would destroy the private sector. Unions would use their funds strategically we were told to gain control of companies and install tame union-loving boards of directors. What would happen next they didn’t bother to spell out; the thought of unionists having control of a private company board was presumably terrible enough of itself without having to imagine the horrors that would flow from it.

I remember Alston putting on a staggering performance at a conference where one of our independent directors challenged his rant filled with absurd predictions and outright lies. Alston’s behaviour was that of a man unhinged - anyone who remembers the vitriol he used to spit at the ABC will have some idea. The pack of dogs around him joined enthusiastically in condemning union superannuation as the virus that would destroy our way of life. The truly frightening thing is that many of them actually believed it.

Needless to say nothing of the sort happened. Union directors of super funds turned out not to want to use all that money to bring capitalism crashing to its knees (though we did have to speak harshly to George Crawford a few times). Believe it or not, they wanted to use super funds to provide the best possible retirement benefits for union members. Well who could have seen that coming? Certainly not the Howards and Alstons and Costellos whose fevered imaginations are incapable of perceiving trade unions as anything other than an anti-social group of thugs intent on wrecking their world.

In a way it’s all the game of politics of course but it would be nice if just once, the conservatives admitted that they’d been wrong about something. They specialise in creating disaster scenarios … Chicken Little isn’t in the same league. Defeat in Berlin/Korea/Vietnam will hand global hegemony to the Commies. Decriminalising pot will cause Australian youth to become a bunch of drug-fucked parasites breaking into your house and stealing your TV. Doing something about global warming will wreck the economy and take us headlong into the third world. And most recently, pulling out of Iraq will see a thousand terrorist cells bloom across the Muslim world, all presumably intent on blowing up Australians.

The thing is … I can’t recall any of these apocalyptic predictions ever turning out to be right. Even when they were made, they lacked any persuasive logic or evidence to back them up. And maybe I’m biased - well I am biased - but these illogical dishonest tactics seem to be a tool particularly favoured by the conservative side of politics. They definitely fall into the ‘half glass empty’ category, as I heard the president of the USA express it (gosh he’s cute with those little verbal slips).

Anyway industry superannuation turned out to be one of the better legacies of the Hawke/Keating Government, and I’m glad I played some minor part in preparing the ground for it.