The Coalition's Industrial Relations (IR) legislation needs to be examined in conjunction with its social security and 'anti terrorist' legislative agenda, for Australians to understand the ideological and practical ramifications of Howard's 'Spring Carnival trifecta'. These three pieces of legislation have been designed to complement each other and provide the framework that allows the government to use the judicial, enforcement and administrative arms of the State apparatus to promote the interests of government and the corporate / business sector at the expense of individual citizens and the community.
It's ironic that a government that has championed small government, the individual and decreased taxation, has greatly increased the power government can exercise over its citizens, is the highest taxing government in Australian history and has massively expanded and uses the enforcement arm of the State to declare war against its own citizens as well as pursue its neo colonial ambitions in the Pacific and the rest of the world.
The Howard government's social security legislative agenda is designed to create a pool of poorly paid part time workers by forcing people with major health problems, single parents, off social security benefits into those poorly paid, boring, monotonous jobs that people don't like doing. The increasing numbers of working poor the changes will create, and the increasing numbers of 'guest' workers that are entering Australia, will act as a cheap labour pool that will allow business to keep wages artificially low for most blue collar and white collar workers as a result of the government's IR legislation that, for all practical realities, forces individual workers to accept whatever individual contract the corporate world and small business cares to offer them.
The new anti dissent laws that have been introduced to fight the scourge of terrorism, will in all probability not stop terrorism but have successfully stripped away rights, liberties and protections that individual Australians have enjoyed against the arbitrary use of State power, will be used (like in the Scott Parkin case) to harass, intimidate, detain and interrogate without charge individuals who have the audacity to openly challenge government policy. Those individuals and groups that continue to defy the government could soon find themselves cooling their heels in the massive new detention centre that has been built on Christmas Island.
Those readers who think that this last scenario sounds a little bit far fetched and could never happen in Australia, only need to remember what is currently happening to asylum seekers in Australia to understand that most frequent and greatest threat citizens face is not foreign invasion or the threat of terrorist outrages, but the threat posed by governments that have put legislative frameworks in place that allow them to exercise absolute power.