Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese used his National Press Club (NPC) address on June 10 to announce his government was organising “a group of leaders from the business community, the union movement and civil society” to participate in a “roundtable to support and shape our government’s growth and productivity agenda” this August.

The objective of this roundtable, Albanese said, was to build broad support for more economic reform to drive growth, boost productivity, strengthen the budget and “secure the resilience of our economy, in a time of global uncertainty”.

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This should ring warning bells to the union movement and civil society when a Labor government tries to enlist those sectors to support that agenda.

“Economic reform” in this case is code for the billionaire class’ insatiable demands to further reduce the already-too-little tax it pays, grab more public subsidies, further erode environmental and social regulations and further weaken workers’ rights to organise on the job.

Decades ago, the Bob Hawke-Paul Keating Labor governments deployed a series of roundtables between it, big business and unions to implement pro-capitalist “economic reforms”, with the help of the infamous Prices and Incomes Accord.

It was a massive con job, as former Green Left editor Norm Dixon explained in 2001.

“For seven years, between 1975 and 1983, Australian workers suffered under the attacks of a union-bashing, conservative government that attempted to roll back the gains the labour movement had won in the early 1970s,” Dixon wrote.

“While capital was able to claw back some gains — real wages were reduced — it was not sufficient to restore big business profit levels to that of the 1960s. Nor had the conservatives been able to defeat the labour........

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