If bets were placed on the chances of pigs flying over Perth, or a former president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions criticising employers for paying their workers high wages, it's a fair chance that the flying pigs would get shorter odds.
If bets were placed on the chances of pigs flying over Perth, or a former president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions criticising employers for paying their workers high wages, it's a fair chance that the flying pigs would get shorter odds.
But, in another of those "fact is stranger than fiction" events it seems that the one-time union leader, and now Resources Minister, Martin Ferguson, is angry about employees on north-west resource projects getting oodles of loot.
Why? Because if Ferguson was correctly reported after his heated encounter with WA mining and oil companies on Monday he said: "A corporate construction agreement with a base rate of $150,000 per annum and superannuation of 9% if just plain wrong". And why is it wrong? Apparently because high wages are not in the national interest.
Back in the 1990s, before Ferguson was elected to Parliament, he was the man urging higher-and-higher wages for workers. In effect, he set in train the very process which has ensured that remote area workers get high rates of pay.
What's changed? Lots is the simple answer, and not just in Ferguson's world. Suddenly, after the turmoil of the mining tax crisis and the sacking of the Lecturer in Chief, Kevin Rudd, a number of light bulbs have been switched on Canberra, and in the business community.
Politicians from the left have realised that they have to work with business because it is business which actually employs people - a discovery to which Homer Simpson would say "duh".
Business, especially mining companies, have discovered that they have been talking to the wrong people for the past 10 years when it comes to being heard by the wider community.
Ferguson's epiphany was summed up in a second quote from his Monday encounter: "I do not accept that some of the agreements that have been put in place are in the national interest."
Decoded, he was saying that it is a bad thing that people in the resource states of WA and Queensland are being paid more than people doing similar jobs in Sydney and Melbourne, disregarding the difficulties of working in remote Australia.
But, rather than welcome this creation of wealth for workers and resource companies he wants to drag everyone back to a lower income level which better suits the big cities where most votes are to be harvested.
Pulling everyone down to the lowest common level is one way of describing what Ferguson wants when, as anyone with an understanding of how to grow a country knows, it is better to lift everyone to a higher level.
As for the mining companies their epiphany came with the realisation that talking to analysts and other bean-counters in the financial community might be good for your share price because it sucks in fresh investors, but disregarding the wider media and political world can almost cost you the right to conduct business in Australia.
That can best be seen with the aid of hindsight because in the first few weeks of the Rudd tax grab in May miners were horrified to see that the national media lined up with the government and said a killer tax on resources was a good thing for the country. Only a handful of old hands in the media recognised that Australia was in deep trouble.
What followed was a mad scramble for survival, including an expensive advertising campaign which would not have been necessary if the miners had kept open the channels of communication to the financial and political media.
It has been amusing in recent days to hear senior Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton executives express astonishment that so few journalists actually understand the process of mineral discovery and mine development.
Perhaps it is because the big companies consider themselves global players and the time for dealing with insignificant local has passed. Perhaps it's because their government and media relations people do not know how to do their jobs, or have been told to cut marketing costs by their bosses.
Whatever the correct answer you can bet there is going to be a lot more "marketing" of the mining story in the next few years, and not just to the people who can get the share price up.
