Peter Costello, Janet Albrechtsen and Peter Reith, and yes they've come to offer you freedom and choice and heaps of snake oil and jelly ...

(Above: oh yes, give me some of that good old fashioned rapture).

Conspiracy?

There's Peter "the smug smirk" Costello blathering on in the Fairfax rags with Liberals must protect values of freedom and choice.

Along the way he produces a fine flurry of sectarianism of a kind which surely would make the lips of Gerard Henderson purse, as he hunts out the Catholics in the Liberal system, and their affinity with the DLP.

Poor old Barners cops a serve:

One Coalition spokesman who seems to have an affinity with the old regulated order of the Australian economy is Barnaby Joyce. These days he is apparently free to speak on all areas of policy. Writing recently in the The Canberra Times, Joyce made much of his Jesuit education as a reason for airing doubts about free trade. According to Joyce, most of the Australian economy is protected in one way or another and ''once you start protecting some things then you start to protect others".

Oh Barners, you silly old tyke you.

And Tony Abbott cops a little collateral damage, though it's reduced to a few fey Costello observations about ruling things in or out. Like ruling out individual contracts.

Oh what a naughty socialist DLP Santamaria Catholic that Abbott is ...

Of course Costello, being a smug smirker, is much more at home with the happy clappy crowd at Hillsong (Costello's Hillsong), that's when he's not offering moral support to fruitloops like Danny Nalliah and then claiming he didn't really mean anything like that at all (Costello tries to hose down Catch the Fire connection).

So it makes perfect sense for Costello to drag matters of religion into consideration of policies.

But that conspiracy we mentioned?

Well as usual it's the conspiracy of the chattering commentariat, who infallibly end up singing from the one song sheet, because over at the lizard Oz, there's Janet "Dame Slap" Albrechtsen scribbling away with Tony Abbott, a warrior is not afraid to come out fighting, wherein the comfortably well heeled scribbler explains how important it is for employers to be able to unilaterally screw their employees ...

Once again the catch cry is freedom and choice, which is subtle code for the right of employees to choose the freedom to be screwed by their employers, with or without the use of KY jelly (yes, it's your choice if you want the optional benefit of a smooth screwing).

It all sounds like a wonderful new world of freedom for the mug punter:

As Liberal leader, Abbott's task is to explain the Liberal philosophy of freedom in the workplace where common sense dictates that employers and employees ought to be able to enter into individual contracts if that is the desire of both parties. And common sense dictates that a "no-disadvantage test" will protect employees.

Sure, and it worked out terribly well for John Howard.

The nub of course, is why both parties might want to enter into individual contracts in the matter of selling hamburgers in a chain of fast food stores, as if the individual employee doesn't already cop enough by way of abuse from minimum wages, flexible hours and bullying employers ...

You can just see the check out chicks or the sweat shop workers in the rag trade right at this moment storming up to management and demanding they be put on individual contracts, and the right to work at the prices paid for workers in factories in China, so that Australia might export Steve Jobs' technology marvels to the world (and never mind a few suicides along the way).

With a bit of luck we could end up matching the massive shift of wealth to the ruling elite of the United States ... which is not to say the ruling elite of politicians or bureaucrats but the actual, practical, effective ruling elite of the filthy rich ...

When you cut away from the rhetorical chase, common sense tells you this is just another way to shift the money away from the workers to the wealthy, dressed up with fine sounding words not out of place in a tract for the French Revolution.

And there is of course a wider conspiracy, involving Abbott and his failure to give Peter Reith the nod for the Liberal party presidency.

Reith has declared war on Abbott and the matter of individual contracts, as he outlined recently on Lateline in Reith warns much at stake in Liberal IR debate.

"I'm not gong to belt into Tony here and now but I do say to him, as I'm sure others are saying within the party, this is an issue we really need to look at very closely," he said.

"I think he needs a decent mandate going into the next election... if we are not up-front about what we are going to do and if we don't have a substantial policy we're not going to get any reform and Australia cannot afford to have 10 years of a re-regulated Labor market."

Sound familiar? Well it would if you read the last words in Albrechtsen's piece:

... the rosy future imagined in 2007 is very different from this year's looming economic uncertainty.That's why Abbott, as Liberal gladiator, ought to gird his loins for a workplace battle with the ALP. If his intention is to introduce major changes after the election, he ought to ask for a mandate. If his intention is to do little as PM to return greater freedom to the workplace, he ought to think again.

Yep, the tykes with a social conscience in the Liberal party are going to cop a pounding to ensure that Tony Abbott does a John Howard, and has a go at making sure that the 'flexible' labour market is even more flexible once the election is done and dusted ...

So while all the old farts - roaming around as ersatz antipodean tea partiers - keep on babbling on about the mining tax and the carbon tax and the footy club tax, acting and sounding like lickspittle lackeys and shills for assorted billionaires, footy thugs, and the coal industry, the pond has some wise words of advice for youngsters out and about in the labour market.

Get plenty of KY jelly. Heaps of it.

Oh and bring a good sense of humour, so you can laugh at lines like this from Albrechtsen:

That's why it's time for the Liberal Party to step aside from the self-imposed shadow that has hung over the party since the ACTU campaign against Work Choices. A similar campaign won't work as it did in 2007. For starters, if Work Choices alone explained Howard's loss, voters would have been ready with baseball bats. Instead, Australians had simply grown tired of a longstanding government.

Yes, it was just simple tiredness, nothing personal, nothing particular, just a waft and a wave of the hands and a simple line: "oh do go away dear Johnnie, we're so tired and over you."

Nothing to do with policies at all. And nothing to do with ideology. And certainly nothing to do with people feeling the pinch in the labour market.

When writing a column, especially if you're well-heeled, make sure you carry your delusions with you at all times.

So you can scribble without a smirk how people just want to be free and to chose, and to hire a dozen lawyers to negotiate with the dozen lawyers the employer brings to the party ...

Well if you believe that, make sure you have plenty of KY jelly standing by.

What's that, clause 1 says take it or leave it, and that's it, and you're feeling a little bruised and is there anything to be done about it, apart from just taking it?

Sorry, if you read your individual contract, you'll have already noticed that in clause 23 (a) subsection (ii) paragraph 3, amongst the specific exclusions is the need of the employer to provide any smoothing materials whilst indulging in one on one contractual negotiations ...

(Below: yes freedom and choice, and joy through strength, and oh by the way, arbeit macht frei, which isn't a breach of Godwin's Law but a clever reference to a Weimar republic slogan).