The Albanese government’s National Reconstruction Fund is a $15 billion handout to “Aussie made” big business. Labor calls it the first step in its “plan to rebuild Australia’s industrial base”. The off-budget fund will invest in seven sectors of the economy: resources, agriculture, transport, medical science, renewables, advanced technology manufacturing and defence. 

The NRF is supposed to fortify Australia’s “national sovereignty”. In the last few years global supply chains have been disrupted by the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and climate disasters. While the initial shocks have subsided, the Labor government is looking to shore up domestic industry to better insulate the economy in a period of increasing instability. 

Another motivation for the fund is rising tensions with China. Albanese is taking a page out of US President Joe Biden’s book, whose Chips and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act have provided a big boost to US manufacturing with the aim of reducing dependence on Chinese imports in sectors key for the military, such as silicon chips and advanced technologies.

The fund’s benefits for Australian manufacturing bosses are clear, which is why it’s been warmly received by the Australian Industry Group. They must also get a kick out of how little red tape the fund imposes on the businesses it invests in. 

In accordance with Labor’s “tripartite” approach, unions were invited along with the bosses to consult on the bill. Concerns were also raised about the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which the NRF is supposed to emulate. The CEFC invested $125 million in Snowy Hydro 2.0, a hydropower project in New South Wales, despite many health and safety issues. The Australian Council of Trade Unions requested that companies that receive NRF funding should have enterprise agreements, that a labour standards policy should be enforced and that union officials should sit on the fund’s board of directors. 

A search of the bill reveals Labor’s response to the unions’ submission. The terms “union”, “wages”, or “conditions” do not appear. 

The unions have so far not kicked up a fuss about this rebuff. Why would they? Australian manufacturing unions have long sold the idea that getting a “fair share for manufacturing” is also good for workers, and that electing Labor governments that promise to support “making it here” is how to get the goods. 

We can go back to the “industry plans”, inspired by the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union’s “People’s Economic Program” of 1977, and in the Prices and Incomes Accords of the Hawke-Keating Labor governments of 1983-1996. The People’s Economic Program argued that transnational corporations and their allies in the Liberal Party, rather than the ruling class as a whole, were the source of unemployment and attacks on wages and conditions. The solution was to elect a Labor government committed to more “progressive” policies, particularly for involving the unions in the development of domestic manufacturing.

When they came to fruition, the industry plans were a disaster for workers. In Stuff the Accord! Pay Up!: Workers’ Resistance to the ALP-ACTU Accord, labour historian and activist Liz Ross describes how the plans were “promoted as providing a secure future for workers and the economy and a way for unions to intervene in the economy and have a role in determining policy ... Profitability returned in areas covered by the industry plans, but there was a massive loss of jobs, and lower wages and conditions, for workers in the waterfront, steel, textiles and meat industries and the federal public sector”.

We’re told that “making it here” is about protecting jobs from offshoring, as well as investment in sectors whose expansion workers have an interest in, such as renewables. But the union leaders pushing these campaigns, whose positions depend on playing a delicate balancing act between the interests of their members and the employers, are not confronting these issues by mobilising their members against the bosses and the state to shape the economy in workers’ interests. 

Instead they look to deals with Labor governments and industry groups. Lobbying and collaborating are no doubt safer alternatives for the union officials than costly and potentially explosive strikes, and those who play the game “sensibly” could one day land themselves a seat in parliament or an extremely comfortable position at the head of an industry superannuation fund. 

The union leaders’ plan is not only about economics and self-promotion. They are stoking Australian nationalism. Nationalism makes workers think we’ve got interests in common with Australian capitalists. It softens us up to accept the prerogatives of the ruling class as in our own interests. 

But under capitalism, no “tripartite” collaboration, so cherished by Labor and the unions, can make industry work for the working class. Any deals we make need to be based, not on “good-faith” collaboration, but on strikes and mobilisations that force the bosses into concessions. And even then, the capitalist economy will always be shaped by the interests of the capitalist class. 

We need to do what the campaign to “make it here” does not: revive in our unions the tradition of struggle from below, to fight the bosses and government tooth and nail for industries that work for us, not ones that build $368 billion nuclear submarines designed to unleash “Aussie made” death and destruction on workers overseas.