On Sunday, when Rein decided to sell the Australian arm of her business, it was clear that her business had been sacrificed on the altar of the union agenda to get union-driven awards back in our workplaces. Her business, which employs workers using common law contracts, simply could not remain there to remind us that small business succeeds on the back of flexible workplace arrangements that are anathema to the union movement. Put another way, her business success was a ringing endorsement of the Coalition's two-fold policy to let people negotiate their own terms of work and to get unions off their back.

Here is a woman who ought to be the hero of working Australians. She built up a business from scratch, has put many thousands of unemployed workers into jobs (never a concern of the unions), employs more than 1300 Australians across the nation, in addition to her overseas operations.

And why is she giving it up? Not because of a conflict of interest arising from her business securing government contracts to re-train the unemployed. That conflict has existed all along. That could have been managed with disclosure processes in place. Professional husbands and wives, lawyers and investment bankers working on the opposite side of takeovers manage their business conflicts every day. Big businesses manage their conflicts with probity advisers. The Rudd-Rein conflicts, both real and perceived, could have been worked out in a way that addressed the concerns raised by her re-training business.

The conflict of interest was always a furphy. Instead, Rein was brought undone by a conflict of policy. Once we learned, late last week, that her business employed workers using common law contracts, she became a successful symbol of the flexibility that Labor Party policy rejects. Sure, Rein's business Work Directions Australia has not used AWAs, which Labor promises to abolish.

But she has used common law contracts and if unions had their way, these too would be sidelined. Unions tolerate common law contracts because they are subordinated to awards. Their agenda is to extend collective agreements underpinned by awards so that there is less place for individual common law contracts. To have Rein there, running a successful business with flexible workplace practices, would have been an indictment of the core Labor agenda: the reintroduction of awards across Australia.

The episode is only made more disgraceful because Rein is nothing short of an inspiration. In 1989, borrowing $7500 secured against her house, she began working with people who were injured in the workplace and unable to return to their previous jobs. Her first clients were people who thought their working lives were finished: a boilermaker, a nurse, a member of the defence forces, all injured at work with no prospect of returning to their chosen field. In an interview with me a few weeks ago, she recalled the sense of devastation these people felt and the sense of achievement in helping people on the scrap heap discover their skills and competencies.

One man in his 40s, who left school at 13, lost an eye and worked as a bricklayer but found himself unable to work after a back injury. "There was a real question as to what he was going to do," she told me. "How was he going to regain his independence? He felt like he had hit a brick wall." It turned out this man was president of his local fishing club. He knew everything about fishing: what bait to use, all the good fishing spots, what fish you would catch and where depending on the weather on a particular day. With Rein's help, he ended up working in the local fishing shop.

Eighteen years on, what was a small niche enterprise has grown into a multi-million dollar business of 66 offices where 1300 employees are, at any one time, helping to retrain 90,000 unemployed people in Australia, Germany, France and Britain.

Rein's own inspiration is well documented. Her father, suffering severe spinal injuries inflicted during World War II, retrained to become an aeronautical engineer. Rein says there was a lot of "I don't think you can do that" from people surrounding her disabled father. Her mother was not one of the naysayers. "She was a yay-sayer," says Rein. There was always a sense of "let's have a go", she recalls.

She describes her father, who loved maths as an elegant, logical form of thinking, encouraging a 10-year-old Rein who was struggling with long division. Driving her to school one morning before a test, he told her the dorky story about the little red engine that chugs up a steep hill with a long load to the tune of "I think I can". "When someone who is in that much pain and is coping with pulling such a long load of his own says 'I think you can' it's a very big, powerful thing," she says.

Rein's business success was about harnessing that same belief in the long-term unemployed. "It's really personally satisfying to see someone say 'Yes, I can do something. There is a way forward.' I love that," she adds.

In the end, Rein's can-do approach could not withstand the unions' can't-do pressure. And it had nothing to do with the underpayment of some of Rein's workers revealed last week. That was accepted for what it was: a mistake, picked up by an audit and addressed with appropriate compensation to the affected workers. Sure, the underpayment caused Rudd a political embarrassment. He told us so enough times. But Rudd rightly refused to tell Rein to get rid of her business. He mused in front of cameras last week: "She's built it up from scratch and so, do you say, 'Well, that's the end of that, sweetheart'."

In fact he did not need to say it. The unions did it for him. Rein was in effect given her marching orders by the union agenda, which sits at the core of the Labor Party's industrial relations policy, for awards to bring unions back into the workplace.

It's a brutish way to relinquish a business. A modern successful businesswoman - a role model, Queensland Premier Peter Beattie says - forced out by an outdated union addiction to awards. Which reminds me, where are the Labor Party feminists on Rein's decision to relinquish her enormously successful business?

You know, those women who demand that more women enter parliament, become chief executives and board directors, and will push for affirmative action to get them there? Rein gets there through her own grit and determination. Where is her cheer squad among ALP women? Guess what? Looks like feminism has been shafted again for some higher ideological pursuit, this time that of the unions.

Rein's might be the first small business (that became a big business) sacrificed to the union agenda. But if Rudd is elected, it won't be the last.

janeta@bigpond.net.au