Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard are pretty happy about their long-awaited industrial relations policy and the initial reaction to it.

No-one else likes it very much except a few of their fellow Labor politicians, and in private even these have their doubts. But the proud parents are carrying on as if this is exactly what they had hoped for: if both sides are bagging their baby with equal vigour, then it is must be the perfect child. They have got the balance just about right.

When you think about it, this is a most peculiar thing for a political leader to say. The whole point about the party system Australia shares with most democracies is that it is adversarial: you have allies and you have enemies.

Naturally, you expect the enemies to disagree with your ideas and attack them by whatever means possible; there would be something wrong if they didn’t. But to take comfort from the fact that your friends and supporters are equally unhappy seems more than somewhat perverse.

The Australian Labor Party is, after all, supposed to be the party of labour, not the party of capital. Obviously it has moved on from the days when it was simply the political arm of the trade union movement – as society has changed, so has politics.

But it is hard to believe that the ALP has drifted so far from its roots that it actually welcomes the news that its traditional constituency is thinking seriously about giving its first preference to a fringe party which in the past has been regarded as a haven for the fairies in the bottom of the garden.

Yet this is just what is happening: seriously tough-minded unionists are now flirting with the Greens as a more union-friendly party than Labor, and the ALP leadership takes this as a plus. And in terms of Realpolitik, they might even be right. It is a mad world, my masters. John Howard says that the union backlash is a pantomime, and his puppet in Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Peter Hendy, calls the whole policy window-dressing; somewhere in their bunkered headquarters, the pair claim, union bosses are chortling and cracking the champagne bottles. Well, no; they are grinding their teeth and preparing to try and convince the rank and file that they have not been sold out. The official line will be that at least Forward with Fairness is better than WorkChoices – but then, almost anything is better than WorkChoices. The only thing that could be worse would be Son of WorkChoices, the monster anticipated by Finance Minister Nick Minchin when he assured business earlier this year that the whole award system and the Industrial Relations Commission were marked for destruction if the government was returned. For the unions Labor remains by far the lesser of two evils, but that does not make it a positive good.

About the only aspect of Rudd’s policy they really like is the phasing out of AWAs, and even that will take far too long. But when it eventually happens, it will not, as the unions had hoped, restore their former access to work places.

The restrictions imposed by Howard will remain, with only one serious exception: if a majority of workers in an enterprise vote to have a union negotiate on their behalf, the union will be admitted.

This does not mean, as Howard claims, that a single unionist could compel the rest of the workforce to sign up, but it does mean that employers will no longer be able to completely disregard the wishes of the total workforce, as is now the case. As they say, almost anything is better than WorkChoices.

And the other side of the equation is that business, with the exception of the predictable Hendy, isn’t too unhappy about it. The heavies will, of course, continue to campaign for Howard; unlike Rudd, they are not interested in balance. But when BHP-Billiton says it can live with the Labor policy, then you know it can’t be too frightening. Howard’s scare campaign has been effectively strangled at birth which of course was the idea. There’s no denying that it’s good middle-of-the-road politics, and that it could well win the election for Rudd. But when the euphoria subsides, there will be a few old Labor warriors asking each other: is this really what we were fighting for? Coincidentally, just as Rudd and Gillard were proudly displaying their offspring to the public, the Fairfax papers came out with a truly horrific series about the way foreign workers were being exploited, cheated and in some cases killed by the 457 visa system designed to fill the gaps in the local workforce left by years of government neglect. The writers produced example after example of almost unbelievable callousness on the part of Australian employers, showing that in some cases the cold-blooded and deliberate abuse of the system amounted to something very like slavery, and that the victims were generally powerless to fight back: under Howard’s laws they could be sacked without notice and immediately deported at the whim of their bosses, who proceeded to demonstrate the truth of Lord Acton’s axiom about power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely. The responsible minister Kevin Andrews, lied through his paper-thin lips that the “guests” had the same protection as other workers, and that the cases cited were exceptional; they weren’t, and the only reason they had come to light was through the media, and, dare one say it, the unions, which were not permitted to intervene directly, but had been able to gain some publicity for the most outrageous atrocities. Had they the kind of access they were guaranteed before WorkChoices, they would have saved considerable suffering and at least three lives.

There are times when balance just doesn’t work. Rudd must not forget which side he is really on.