Kevin, we need to talk about you

For years the ACTU leadership has been based on public sector - mainly teachers union - officials whose experience is altogether different from those who deal with the private economy.

Those who remember the mining boom of the 1980s remember most the attitude that the workers should be as rapacious as the miners. The result was a short-lived boom and a wages breakout that started in the mining sector, which could afford it, and spread to all sectors of the economy, which could not. When the boom crashed, the resultant wages overhang and high unemployment took years to unwind.

We see clearly now that the global financial crisis was, for Australia at least, a brief interruption to a long-term resources boom and deeper engagement with China. It was not the end of capitalism, as essayist Rudd led us to believe. The time has come for a more serious consideration of how to set sail for growth.

The themes that Hawke brought to government - recovery (economic), reconstruction (infrastructure) and reconciliation (industrial) - were universal themes that could engage the workforce in an economic dialogue. The Rudd government has no language and no insight into economics.

This was always going to become a problem when economic management came to the fore. The burgeoning environmental agenda and, somewhat contrarily, the global financial crisis, clouded the path to ongoing reform of the Australian economy.

A seminal green paper from 1993, the Prime Minister's Committee on Employment Opportunities' Restoring Full Employment, posed a hard question: “Are we prepared to reduce constraints to business expansion, such as disincentives to hire people?”

This government has to come up with an answer to that question. Labor does not have to revisit incomes policies or trade union accords.

Those devices played their part but are no longer necessary. What is necessary is that workers and bosses can cut a deal keeping in mind the viability of the business in which they are engaged, not a business thousands of kilometres away in the Pilbara in northwest Western Australia or in the Surat Basin in southwest Queensland.