Whether
Labor wins the electoral battle this time or not, their great victory
of 2016 is over their old war within. For the same reason Malcolm
Turnbull took to the stage with an election night tanty howling at the
“mass ranks of the union movement”, Bill Shorten was right to praise “the mighty trade union movement” of Australia for what they had done for his party.
I spent election night in the “Bob Hawke Room” at the Australian Council of Trade Union building in Melbourne – there could be no more appropriate place to be reminded of the historical power of union campaigning. At a white board by the largest screen broadcasting the results, the ACTU’s head of campaigning, Sally McManus, placed ticks next to a list of seats as each fell away from the Coalition. The list comprised of those seats targeted by the ACTU in their largest ground campaign since Your Rights At Work unseated John Howard in 2007. The staff here have nicknamed her Field Marshal McManus.
It’s not hard to understand their choice of language. Since the election of the Coalition in 2013, the conservatives’ engagement with the unions have been open acts of combat. There was persecution of the movement with the royal commission into trade unions. Attempts to smash the CFMEU by reintroducing the union-busting star-chambers of the Australian Building and Construction Commission. The “Registered Orgs” legislation that forces restrictions of activity on non-government organisations.
The response of the unions to these, however, was not to be drawn into brawls on Tory turf in the courts or to merely lobby Labor in pleas for their survival. In perhaps the most powerful realisation of this election cycle, the union leadership saw the Coalition assault on their ability to organise for what it was – an attempt to destroy their structural protection of wages and conditions for all workers, and to blunt the protection provided by powerful health, education, public sector, construction and electricity unions to the public systems both Abbott and Turnbull were visibly working to defund and dismantle.
Led by one-time lift mechanic, Dave Oliver and career nurse, Ged Kearney, the movement doubled down on its strongest resource – its active membership – to fight for the values of Australian egalitarianism understood within it. The Australian called the 16,000 union volunteers co-ordinated by McManus in a campaign that targeted 22 seats, the “ACTU secret army”, even though the door-knocks, street stalls, phone banks, sit-ins and street theatre it engaged in for an entire year before the election were anything but covert.
I myself marched with the army alongside hospitality workers demanding the right to penalty rates in Hobart, staked out the lawn of Parliament House in Canberra with seafarers demanding the protection of local jobs, sat down in the Sydney streets with truck drivers campaigning for the return of safe rates of pay, enjoyed a picnic for equal pay with early childhood educators in Melbourne and joined the sad May Day march in Toowoomba grieving the loss of an 18-year-old kid killed in an industrial accident doing work-for-the-dole.
The ACTU and its affiliates hitting the streets for community values was the most effective reversal of electoral orthodoxy in a generation. This was no cheque drafted to the Labor party from the union movement to represent their interests; it was an investment made by the movement into a public conversation about fairness, opportunity and community that Labor – in an act of recognition that could yet rescue it from a brand-damaging two decades of post-Keating ideological fuzziness – realised it could, should, must embrace and would be politically crazy to not heed.
Because what has been exposed by every phenomenon of this particular election is that the neoliberal “economic rationalist” ideology that once romanced the Labor party and now holds the Liberal-National Coalition in its thrall, is a belief system the Australian electorate do not like.
Labor, at least, has realised that policies that hand money to big corporations in tax cuts, increase casualisation, offshore jobs, privatise public infrastructure and slash spending on welfare and services long alienated the party from its social base – and I know I’m not alone in believing it’s why Labor’s primary vote has taken such a kicking over these last years. Labor’s Chris Bowen admitted as much himself on Q&A on Monday night.
“We’re seeing the rise of the disenfranchised and disillusioned, people who feel left out,” he said. “People feel they are not getting the benefits of economic growth because, in many instances, they are not.”
But these unpopular policies are the very definition of what Turnbull and the Liberals took to the election – and they’re impossible to spruik honestly to working class voters in any electoral ground game. It’s why disaffected social conservatives are easy pickings for Hanson, why the centre-right has drifted to the protectionist Xenophon, and why the Liberals desperately tried to summon distractions out of non-economic issues like terrorists and boat people throughout their long campaign.
Yet it’s also how unions and Labor were able to bring a first-term government with rich corporate backers, millions to spend and a once-shining wonderboy leader to its electoral knees. In the 22 seats the unions campaigned in on the explicit issues of fairness, penalty rates, education, healthcare, public infrastructure the average swing away from the government was 5.5%. The gains were in younger, lower-income and working class electorates where voters finally heard someone they knew and recognised speaking to what was of value in their own lives.
As I write this, the whiteboard at the ACTU has 12 seat wins marked, and there remains confidence that more are still going to fall.
And the big revelation here is there’s a reason the right want to demonise and destroy the unions, and why right-leaning commentators in this country have spent so many years pooh-poohing union involvement in Labor.
It’s because those people don’t want Labor to win – and certainly not on the values of public ownership of infrastructure, equality of opportunity, economic fairness and equity in the workplace, that are a trade union movement’s demands. They want a cowed opponent. Instead, they’re facing a “war room”, field marshals and an union army with a new electoral energy, it seems, for the political battles ahead.
I spent election night in the “Bob Hawke Room” at the Australian Council of Trade Union building in Melbourne – there could be no more appropriate place to be reminded of the historical power of union campaigning. At a white board by the largest screen broadcasting the results, the ACTU’s head of campaigning, Sally McManus, placed ticks next to a list of seats as each fell away from the Coalition. The list comprised of those seats targeted by the ACTU in their largest ground campaign since Your Rights At Work unseated John Howard in 2007. The staff here have nicknamed her Field Marshal McManus.
It’s not hard to understand their choice of language. Since the election of the Coalition in 2013, the conservatives’ engagement with the unions have been open acts of combat. There was persecution of the movement with the royal commission into trade unions. Attempts to smash the CFMEU by reintroducing the union-busting star-chambers of the Australian Building and Construction Commission. The “Registered Orgs” legislation that forces restrictions of activity on non-government organisations.
The response of the unions to these, however, was not to be drawn into brawls on Tory turf in the courts or to merely lobby Labor in pleas for their survival. In perhaps the most powerful realisation of this election cycle, the union leadership saw the Coalition assault on their ability to organise for what it was – an attempt to destroy their structural protection of wages and conditions for all workers, and to blunt the protection provided by powerful health, education, public sector, construction and electricity unions to the public systems both Abbott and Turnbull were visibly working to defund and dismantle.
Led by one-time lift mechanic, Dave Oliver and career nurse, Ged Kearney, the movement doubled down on its strongest resource – its active membership – to fight for the values of Australian egalitarianism understood within it. The Australian called the 16,000 union volunteers co-ordinated by McManus in a campaign that targeted 22 seats, the “ACTU secret army”, even though the door-knocks, street stalls, phone banks, sit-ins and street theatre it engaged in for an entire year before the election were anything but covert.
I myself marched with the army alongside hospitality workers demanding the right to penalty rates in Hobart, staked out the lawn of Parliament House in Canberra with seafarers demanding the protection of local jobs, sat down in the Sydney streets with truck drivers campaigning for the return of safe rates of pay, enjoyed a picnic for equal pay with early childhood educators in Melbourne and joined the sad May Day march in Toowoomba grieving the loss of an 18-year-old kid killed in an industrial accident doing work-for-the-dole.
The ACTU and its affiliates hitting the streets for community values was the most effective reversal of electoral orthodoxy in a generation. This was no cheque drafted to the Labor party from the union movement to represent their interests; it was an investment made by the movement into a public conversation about fairness, opportunity and community that Labor – in an act of recognition that could yet rescue it from a brand-damaging two decades of post-Keating ideological fuzziness – realised it could, should, must embrace and would be politically crazy to not heed.
Because what has been exposed by every phenomenon of this particular election is that the neoliberal “economic rationalist” ideology that once romanced the Labor party and now holds the Liberal-National Coalition in its thrall, is a belief system the Australian electorate do not like.
Labor, at least, has realised that policies that hand money to big corporations in tax cuts, increase casualisation, offshore jobs, privatise public infrastructure and slash spending on welfare and services long alienated the party from its social base – and I know I’m not alone in believing it’s why Labor’s primary vote has taken such a kicking over these last years. Labor’s Chris Bowen admitted as much himself on Q&A on Monday night.
“We’re seeing the rise of the disenfranchised and disillusioned, people who feel left out,” he said. “People feel they are not getting the benefits of economic growth because, in many instances, they are not.”
But these unpopular policies are the very definition of what Turnbull and the Liberals took to the election – and they’re impossible to spruik honestly to working class voters in any electoral ground game. It’s why disaffected social conservatives are easy pickings for Hanson, why the centre-right has drifted to the protectionist Xenophon, and why the Liberals desperately tried to summon distractions out of non-economic issues like terrorists and boat people throughout their long campaign.
Yet it’s also how unions and Labor were able to bring a first-term government with rich corporate backers, millions to spend and a once-shining wonderboy leader to its electoral knees. In the 22 seats the unions campaigned in on the explicit issues of fairness, penalty rates, education, healthcare, public infrastructure the average swing away from the government was 5.5%. The gains were in younger, lower-income and working class electorates where voters finally heard someone they knew and recognised speaking to what was of value in their own lives.
As I write this, the whiteboard at the ACTU has 12 seat wins marked, and there remains confidence that more are still going to fall.
And the big revelation here is there’s a reason the right want to demonise and destroy the unions, and why right-leaning commentators in this country have spent so many years pooh-poohing union involvement in Labor.
It’s because those people don’t want Labor to win – and certainly not on the values of public ownership of infrastructure, equality of opportunity, economic fairness and equity in the workplace, that are a trade union movement’s demands. They want a cowed opponent. Instead, they’re facing a “war room”, field marshals and an union army with a new electoral energy, it seems, for the political battles ahead.
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