WorkChoices is dead. Brendan Nelson has said it clearly. There’s no room for nuance here. Now, the Liberals might have a chance to turn IR to their advantage.

The Liberals will cop some flak for their decision. Sid Marris calls it “cowardice” in the Australian. It will be asked if the Liberals stand for anything – but no one really expects a party four weeks into opposition after 11 years in government to have detailed policy positions.

The Liberals would have been on a hiding to nothing if they kept WorkChoices. They would have been marginalised by the minor parties and the independents in the Senate after July 1, when they should have been recovering.

The union campaign made WorkChoices political poison. It cannot be sold. The last thing the Liberals want is to spend the next three years defending the policy. If WorkChoices couldn’t be sold from government, it was never going to happen in opposition. It was time to cut and run.

Now Nelson can move on and start to frame his own leadership, free from the shadow of unpopular Howard government policies. He has already acted swiftly to reposition the Liberal on climate change. Greg Hunt was an excellent choice as shadow environment minister. Dumping WorkChoices was the next step.

But Nelson and Bishop have given things a twist. They have told Gillard to hurry up with the legislation. That’s not a bad thing to do. It’s actually pretty smart.

Given the problems emerging with the unions’ impatience to see the end of WorkChoices, it will only intensify pressure on Gillard to get moving within the union movement and the ALP. The bruvvers would have noticed the Liberals’ comments. Telling Labor to speed things up is the last thing Gillard needs.

Gillard’s timetable is absurd. It doesn’t really make any sense why she would drag things out for so long. Even allowing for the considerable consultation, it shouldn’t take that long to have all the legislation put into parliament. The unions’ 12 month timetable is actually quite reasonable.

Perhaps the Prime Minister needs to lessen Julia’s workload so she can focus properly on workplace relations. Rudd and Gillard were probably hoping that the Coalition would be obstructionist and give them a double dissolution trigger on dismantling WorkChoices.

Instead, Nelson and Bishop have refused to take the bait and even put a bit of heat on the Government in the process.

All in all, that’s not bad thinking from the new Coalition leadership team.

PS. Kevin Andrews must be overjoyed. The Commonwealth pencil pushers are still making industrial relations as bureaucratic as they conceivably can. Why else would the new agreements be called “Interim Transitional Employment Agreements”? If the agreements are Transitional they are by nature Interim, and they are Interim cannot be other than Transitional – clearly tautological. Why can’t they just be called Transitional Employment Agreements? Kevin Rudd has made much about his keenness to slash red tape and get deregulation underway. Plain English – clear and precise language – would be a very good starting point.