Some 20 years ago, I attended a meeting with the chief executive of one of Australia’s largest mining companies.  He had been engaged in a long-running and acrimonious dispute with his workforce. Consequently, his comments to the assembled group were mainly a recitation of the outrageously generous conditions to which his employees had become entitled.

Asked who had conceded the now disparaged work practices and rewards for inactivity, the chief executive sheepishly conceded it would have been company executives, some of whom were still heading up operations.

This encounter has indelibly coloured my view of Australian industrial relations during the ensuing years.

Over that time, Australia moved irrevocably away from its once centralised wage fixing system. Decentralised arrangements more closely reflecting specific workplaces and market circumstances became commonplace especially among large corporates with the best deals coming for the most innovative and skilled negotiators.

Industrial relations battles with their harsh political overtones are now infrequent. The days when governments harangued unions publicly about private sector workplace conditions have largely passed.

A review of penalty rates for weekend work, with the potential to adversely affect millions of workers, is currently underway by Australia’s Fair Work Commission, not the government. Asked recently whether he would support whatever recommendations the commission produced, the parliamentary leader of the Australian Labor Party, the alternative prime minister facing an election within weeks and a former union heavyweight in his own right replied meekly, “Yes”.

"There will be no votes to be had for a politician or party hitting the hustings to urge help for BHP because it has been outwitted by its workers"

Some politicians on the right wing of the political spectrum would prefer defenestration of the unions to go further but that debate is essentially between the extremes of the political spectrum.

In short, little appetite exists in the political mainstream to set workplace wages or conditions. Against this background, the attempted intervention by BHP Billiton through its newly appointed head of mineral operations in Australia was unusual and a tad optimistic.

In an address to the Melbourne Mining Club on 21 April entitled ‘Shared responsibility for reform’, Mike Henry tried to encourage government to reinsert itself into the workplace.

Mr Henry extolled the “hard steps” the company had taken itself “to meet the challenges and opportunities on the horizon”. He lectured those assembled on the need for “relentless attention” to reform. He observed that a boom institutionalises inefficient policies and practices.

That may be true enough but begs the question, just as it did 20 years ago, of who takes responsibility for putting those inefficient policies and practices in place. In this instance, a complex asset structure needed streamlining through divestment. The geographic separation of assets to operate within commodity silos also needed rectification.  

These inefficient policies and practices were all consequences of earlier company decisions many of which were hailed at the time by their instigators as strokes of organisational genius. Go back to the words of Messrs Gilbertson, Goodyear and Kloppers whose magic ingredients for corporate success are now being dismantled in the name of relentless reform.

BHP Billiton has now said that its commercial success requires governments to foster industry competitiveness and sustainable growth “including through the reform of our institutions”. BHP Billiton defines this, in part, as bringing down barriers to trade and a simpler tax system to encourage investment.

Tax policy and trade are not uncontroversial topics but have been given considerable emphasis by successive governments of a trading and capital importing nation like Australia. Debate persists about precise policy settings but few would cavil at the government having a role.

The third element of BHP’s reform agenda – “fostering workplaces that are more balanced, flexible and innovative” – would be less widely embraced. After all, one man’s balance is potentially another’s loss of income.

Henry went on to criticise “the current legislation” as not being as balanced as it needs to be. If BHP wants legislative change, it needs to be less coy. For a start, it needs to address specifically the amendments that it seeks.  It also needs to admit that some of its employees may be worse off and identify the compensating benefits to flow to the community at large to justify the statutory intervention it is seeking.  

As Australia heads toward an election in a few weeks, all voters will have to decide how much emphasis to place on the myriad of issues upon which they could possibly make a judgment about the party to support.

If BHP wants changes to workplace laws, it needs to get its hands dirty. It needs to put a strong case for why its objectives are important enough to affect a vote.

BHP has complained that the content of enterprise agreements has expanded well beyond the key terms of the relationship between an employer and employees, limiting opportunities for further productivity improvements.

Unless it is simply to impress investors that it is thinking about the subject, there is little point in having a public whinge about this. There will be no votes to be had for a politician or party hitting the hustings to urge help for BHP because it has been outwitted by its workers.  

If it wants support, BHP will need to demonstrate that its predicament is due directly to faulty legislation and not simply its own poor industrial relations practices fostered by a misapprehension about the likely success of its business strategies. In asking the government to come to its aid, BHP also needs to show how anticipated productivity benefits will be shared.

Right now, BHP has not made its case. No parties are going to take up the cause when the magnitude of the benefits and the incidence of the reforms are unknown. BHP’s assumption of a shared responsibility is naïve if not simply wrong.

*John Robertson is a director of EIM Capital Managers, an Australia-based funds-management group. He has worked as a policy economist, business strategist and investment-market professional for nearly 30 years, after starting his career as a federal treasury economist in Canberra, Australia