As the Coalition searches for ideas on what its new identity will look like following its worst electoral smashing in 80 years, Liberal MP Garth Hamilton has a novel suggestion that could be summed up as ‘let’s pally up to the unions’!

Before you write off this guy as a nincompoop, let me sum up his argument to befriend the unions. The following points explain why Hamilton says the Libs have to “stop seeing the unions as the enemy”:

1. He wants to reach out to union members rather than union leaders, who are largely in Labor’s camp for political reasons, more than economic or social drives.

2. Union members agree that migration should be reduced.

3. A majority of union members are suspicious of net zero climate goals that threaten their jobs.

4. Writing in The Australian today, Hamilton writes: “What brings together bosses and unions is much more than ­ nature of their work. What brings us together is the desire for a better life. We deploy our capital and our labour because we seek a better life for ourselves and our kids.”

MP for the Queensland seat of Groom, Hamilton says he grew up on a construction site and gets union members. “The unions know that Chris Bowen’s policies will hurt their members and many Labor members have raised those concerns privately,” he writes. “In 2017, the CFMEU campaigned against the Labor candidate in the seat of Toowoomba North because she was against the expansion of our local mine. It was a rare outbreak of the tensions that live within Australia’s labour movement.”

Showing that he’s closer to the real world than many of his colleagues, he concedes that the Libs and unions will disagree on what he says is “over-bearing IR legislation” and other matters, but these make peace with unions difficult.

Labor has been playing a smart game politically, both at the federal and state level by recognising the majority of voters are employees or retirees with an employee background. It has meant they’ve supported pro-employee legislation via industrial relations law changes and have dangled tax cuts and super for all workers, effectively making contractors into quasi-employees entitled to similar entitlements that employees enjoy.

In a perfect world that sounds nice, but being an employer in an imperfect world has become progressively more difficult, with work-from-home demands, wage and super cost increases, the rise of mental health, bullying and sexual harassment claims in the workplace and the money hungry governments that are encouraging their tax officials to aggressively find reasons to slug employers with surprise tax bills.

The Premier of Victoria, who heads up a state where unemployment is the highest in the country, where the crime rate is at an all-time high and where the house price rise is the smallest, showed what the Coalition has to deal with to win over the majority of voters.

This is what the Jacinta Allan Government announced in August this year: “The Allan Labor Government will make working from home a right – because it works for families. Premier Jacinta Allan today announced the Labor Government will introduce legislation to protect the ability of an employee to work from home.

Under this proposed law, if you can reasonably do your job from home, you will have the right to do so for at least two days a week – public sector or private sector.”

This is clever politics but not smart economics. Some workers need and should receive flexibility with respect to their employment but to make WFH a right for potentially all employees is uneconomic and unfair to the people who often risk their homes and personal wealth to create jobs, pay lots of taxes and hopefully make profit.

These people called employers or small business owners are often called “the backbone of the economy” but the weight of all the new age workplace pressures are starting to break their backs!

While Hamilton is smart to look at dividing union members from their union bosses, the Coalition needs to marry employees and bosses together as well.

Unfortunately, to make employees doubt current Labor governments around the country, they’ll need to be taxed more, have interest rates rise and see the unemployment rate go substantially higher.

Bill Clinton once made this political war cry famous: “It’s the economy, stupid!”. And the Coalition’s biggest hope might be in an Australian economy that fails under Labor, but as an employer myself, I certainly can’t wish for that!

Given this, the Coalition will have to wait or produce inspirational leadership to make the party more sellable to the Australian voter. At least Garth Hamilton is thinking ‘outside the square’. And that’s a good start for success.