STEPHEN JOHNSON: Former ACTU leader Bill Kelty highlights how Labor has become socialist
The Labor Party has now moved so far to the left that a former ACTU leader is leading the charge against socialism with the Federal Government wanting to spend $400 million taking over a cash delivery business.
When a former trade union leader is railing against socialism, it’s clearly a sign Labor is moving too far to the left.
The era of neoliberal economics in the Australian Labor Party is well and truly over with Anthony Albanese’s Federal Government looking at spending $400 million on taking over the nation’s near-monopoly cash delivery business Linfox Armaguard.
Bill Kelty, a non-executive director of the company, was previously an ACTU secretary who gave his blessing to previous Labor prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating privatising the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas during the early 1990s.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.A generation later, he hasn’t changed but the Labor Party certainly has, with Mr Kelty suggesting there are better ways of spending $400m than buying up a private business.
“It is a policy of lunacy and stupidity. Frankly, this country can do better than that,” he told the Senate economics committee on Tuesday.
“We can do better than that. This country deserves better than that.
“We come here saying to you quite plainly and clearly that we do not support $400 million being set aside.”
Mr Kelty argued that paying for redundancies, new trucks and cash processing at a prospectively government-run cash-in-transit business was effectively the taxpayers propping up the big four banks and the two big supermarkets, at the expense of helping the vulnerable in society.
“You think we would be so silly to ask that of public policy? Why would we come here and say to the Government, set aside $400 million to effectively subsidise the four major banks and two major retailers because that’s in essence what’s being asked,” he said.
“When people get paid so little in unemployment benefits, where hospitals are under pressure, where we have an inadequacy in terms of nursing, where teachers are underpaid in this country, that there are better things for society to allocate than this.”
New legislation before Parliament proposes to give the Reserve Bank of Australia the power to appoint a statutory manager or an external administrator to oversee the business should it struggle to operate.
Peter Fox, Linfox Armaguard’s executive chairman, said forcing a loss-making company to provide unprofitable services only to be subjected to government control amounted to a state takeover and was an “absolute, outrageous affront”.
“The proposed legislation that you are here contemplating today is blatantly unfair,” he said.
“In the face of what we have achieved to date without any help from the Government, this is a nationalisation by stealth.
“It is not in our common or collective interests to be doing so.”
Linfox and Spanish group Prosegur merged in 2023, creating the new Linfox Armaguard Group giving Linfox a 65 per cent share in a company catering to an economy where cash now makes up just 15 per cent of transactions, based on RBA data.
An agreement with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to provide cash deliveries expires in September, and the Cash Distribution Framework Bill 2026 and Cash Distribution Framework (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill were introduced to Parliament earlier this month.
State intervention into cash distribution is far from the only act of socialism instigated by Labor with the Albanese Government in 2024 moving to block the privatisation of NBN Co.
This reversed a policy implemented by Labor governments led by Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard in 2011, which Mr Albanese served as a minister in.
The 2010s were a different time for the ALP.
A decade ago, Daniel Andrews from Labor’s Socialist Left faction led a government that leased the Port of Melbourne for 50 years.
But Labor’s growing aversion to privatisation can certainly be traced back to Anna Bligh’s Queensland government in 2010 selling off freight rail company QR National, now known as Aurizon, to have funds in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis.
That led to her party being reduced to just seven seats in Parliament at the following election in 2012.
Since then, asset sales have become politically poisonous in the Labor Party with NSW Premier Chris Minns ruling out any further privatisations, a repudiation of his ALP predecessor Bob Carr who took on the party in 1997 in a futile bid to privatise the State’s electricity generators, poles and wires to fund transport infrastructure and pay down debt.
Buying an existing private business that delivers cash is a lot more interventionist than keeping an existing government business enterprise in public hands.
With the Albanese’s own gross government debt set to surpass $1 trillion this financial year - making up more than a third of the economy - socialism is an expensive exercise best avoided.
Mr Kelty, an architect of Australia’s compulsory superannuation system and more flexible industrial relations framework, is someone Labor should listen to again.
