What Tim Gurner’s headburp tells us about politics today

The thing about Tim Gurner that didn’t get mentioned last week is, I mean, what’s the deal with that head? It’s like two and a half heads. Did our leading apartment builder get a height exemption for his head? Now that’s power. He should get a couple of chippies from one of his sites to come over and knock a picture window in, so we can see his brain working at its furious pace. 

Or perhaps not. Gurner’s grovelling apology for his remarks at an AFR summit, entitled something like “Squeeze till the pips burst: managing the workforce in the 21st century”, was hardly in keeping with the heartless Gilded Age image he was cultivating during the session. 

And thereby hangs a far more complex tale than the one being told. Gurner became a global health-and-safety-warning poster boy across the world for the endlessly repeated charge that he had “said the quiet bit out loud” about predatory capitalism. It was something everyone could agree on.

So many indeed that one couldn’t help but be a little suspicious about it. Gurner’s comments were stupid, but chiefly because they didn’t really fit together so well. He called for capitalism red in tooth and claw, fear and pain to quell an uppity workforce.

Yet his formula for this was a rise in the unemployment rate by… 50%. From 3% to 4.5%. That may well cause pain for those involved, but it’s hardly the system shock of the Gilded Age robber baron capitalists. In the US, libertarians like Ron Paul and Trump challenger Vivek Ramaswamy proposed letting the whole banking system collapse or sacking 75% of the federal civil service. 

Those are robber barons in the spirit of Andrew Mellon, Hoover’s Treasury secretary, who surveyed the Great Depression and muttered one word: “liquidate”. “Liquidate stocks, liquidate assets…” Let the system crash, find its own level and reboot. Starve the workers back to the mills. Gurner’s remarks were in that spirit.

But the thing is, we don’t really do capitalism that way anymore. Wage suppression by banning industrial action? OK. Austerity to make room for tax cuts? Yep. Casualise permanent staff? Sure. Keep a certain looseness in the system through high immigration? Absolutely.

But the one thing we don’t really do anymore is shock the system with deliberate sudden crashes. Even when we’re taming inflation, we would rather let it run than really deflate the economy. The reason is not hard to define. The economy is far more dependent on high consumption by workers than it was in an earlier era, when workers had no disposable income. Capitalism, in its current form, seeks to regularise demand, not subject it to caprice. 

So here’s the weird thing about all this. One of the people who does this is… Tim Gurner. Gurner has $10 billion of projects in the pipeline, so the economy has to keep kicking along for those to land. His projects are union sites, with EBAs with the CFMMEU, ETU and others. 

They don’t need to be. His sites are small enough to be non-union. But as he told Yarra Councillor Stephen Jolly on the latter’s Melbourne Calling show, using higher-priced union labour guarantees better project planning, higher skills, etc, etc. If Gurner is getting irritated with uppity workers, why is he signing deals with unions that guarantee the greatest control over their own working conditions?

Well, there are a few possible answers to that. The first is that having a certain nous for property development doesn’t make you an expert on how contemporary capitalism actually works, any more than a jockey is a vet. Or a physicist. 

Developers like Gurner need to believe archaic pre-Keynesian notions about value — that it is sweated out of workers, but emerges as brilliant ideas from the enormous bonces of capitalists — to keep any sense that they are doing something other than moving flows of capital around. 

That’s really why there’s all that monkey glands, life extension, barefoot marathon nonsense. Building contractors used to carry revolvers in the old days. Tim and his ilk are never without their keep cups of seagrass kombucha to fight cell oxidation. The Promethean “grandeur” of the old robber baron capitalists is gone. Now we’re just filling in the gaps. No wonder it’s all float tanks and dolphin communing.

To say this is to make no special plea for Gurner or developers in general. It’s simply to ask how this mythology serves both sides. Business groups keep talking tough about backing slash-and-burn policies, evils of socialism, etc, but they never go all in.

And what keeps labour in line is not business hiring thugs with axe handles, but, well, Labor. Labor created the Fair Work Commission, the anti-strike laws that went with it, and have cossetted business — e.g. Qantas — as it and other oligopolies have run roughshod over workers’ rights.

Tony Burke’s IR reforms may reverse that to a degree, but we’ll wait and see. Both Labor’s promises and business groups’ hysterical reaction to them have the same air of political kabuki about them as Gurner’s grandstanding at an AFR summit (“Tim gets carried away” someone remarked of the brouhaha). The obvious point is that Labor and centre-left groups benefit more from this sort of stuff than the right does. Labor can represent itself as fighting for the workers against the system it created, and point to right-wing bastardry as an excuse for the limited gains made.

Let’s be honest, even within the limited scope available, most unions — above all the SDA — have been happy to let wage theft and illegal casualisation go through, largely because the whole complex of Labor-unions-industry super and the sharemarket is becoming a single entity.

The only time workers get a fighting chance is when they’re with an independent union like the CFMMEU or ETU. You know, the ones Tim Gurner makes deals with. Funny old world, unless you’re a developer who looks like Humpty Dumpty…

Do you agree that Labor is responsible for most of the pain being suffered by workers at the moment? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.