After a watershed week on climate, Albanese is eyeing the Hawke playbook for his upcoming jobs summit | Katharine Murphy

As well as validating the role of unions, Albanese is courting a business community looking for opportunities to work with the new government.

On that score, this has been a watershed week. Many of the groups that once castigated Labor for pursuing carbon pricing while lustily amplifying Tony Abbott lined up to endorse the agenda of Albanese and the climate minister, Chris Bowen, while delivering a backhander to Dutton and the Liberals for their obduracy.

Perhaps the patience of business groups was tested after watching the allegedly pro-market Liberal party call for divisions on every amendment so they could record their idiocy in Hansard for future generations.

I suspect the Liberals even tested their own patience with this performance. Voting no to a sequence of entirely sensible evidence-based propositions for four solid hours was so tedious even the staunchest post-truth naysayers looked bored by the end.

Albanese could have responded by lavishly thanking the business groups for turning up on the right side of history 10 years too late.

So it was interesting this week to see the national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, Daniel Walton, float a compact where businesses would have access to sponsored skilled migration on the basis they invest in domestic skills development.

Walton said one option was a system, where, for every skilled migrant a business employed, it would take on one local trainee or apprentice, or kick in to a skills levy. This may not be the landing point in September. But the early kite-flying suggests an inclination to find some mutually agreeable solution.

Getting a genuine breakthrough (as opposed to tinkering) on workplace relations will be harder.

Then, in 1991, that system was replaced by enterprise bargaining. The Howard government stripped back union power. Structural changes in the economy also precipitated a decline in union density, which is one of the factors contributing to wage stagnation.

Back in 1983, Hawke emerged from his summit with various grand bargains.