Lousy value for money

Dean Mighell was in the news. The Victorian Secretary of the Electrical Trades Union upstaged no lesser personage than Kevin Rudd, on talkback radio in Melbourne.

Those that care about such things will no doubt know the story. For those that came in late, a woman caller to (I think) the Neil Mitchell show was in tears with fear about what could happen to her.

She had insulation installed in her roof and was worried the whole place could go up in flames.

Rudd proffered an emergency response number. She said she’d tried that and it was unhelpful (fancy that, an unhelpful call centre. Who could have thought there’d be such a thing). In fact, they were more concerned about whether she owed them money.

Rudd is promising everything except going around there himself, when it emerges that the good Mister Mighell, a licensed electrician, had arranged to check to see if her insulation was safe. Militant unionist 1. Technocrat hack 0.

Mighell popped up in the Fairfax papers around the same time with an op-ed piece about whether the union movement should keep its links to the ALP. It’s an interesting point, but first some clarification.

One; the ALP was founded by the union movement around 120 years ago after a period of rapid growth in unionism hit a brick wall in the early 1890s when the Victorian land price bubble burst and the floor price of labour collapsed.

Two, not all unions thought tying themselves to a political party was a good idea, and even today most unions aren’t affiliated to the ALP.

Three, from the get-go the parliamentary ALP has tended to pretty much ignore the agenda of the organised labour movement. The primary relationship has been one of personnel. The union movement has employed most ALP politicians at some stage.

This is not to say that those politicians have ever been particularly attached to the principles of the union movement, it’s just that there is a strong history of partiality around unions when it comes to their employment selection practices.

That said, the links between the ALP and trade unions are pretty strong, in a networking rather than policy sense.

Which is why most of the leadership of the ACTU have been largely silent while Julia Gillard is, in reality, cutting wages for hospitality and care workers (amongst others) under the banner of Award Simplification.

Gillard, as she is good at, plays the clever lawyer and argues that it is possible for employees to negotiate their way out of a pay cut. But wasn’t that the whole point about why WorkChoices was bad? That people were expected to have to negotiate a solution rather than having the protection of an Industrial Award?

But the ACTU wants to be seen as a ‘team player’ in the eyes of their ‘friends’ in Canberra. The wooden Jeff Lawrence had a minor whine about it, Sharon Burrow doesn’t want to criticise her buddy Julia. So the whole situation has been largely ignored.

The problem is probably a lot bigger than the few news articles that have covered it would suggest. After all, these are people at the bottom of the labour market, so who really gives a shit?

I am meeting people caught up in it. Anecdotally, the vast majority are un-unionised casuals, so they just suck it up and wonder why Kevin Rudd is doing what John Howard did.

Unions that aren’t affected by it seem to be rather indifferent to the plight of these workers. The ‘I’m all right Jack’ principle is ascendant in the modern labour movement.

But most union officials must be, at the very least, slightly uneasy about how things have panned out. Wasn’t the Your Rights At Work campaign supposed to do away with the assault on working conditions at the perennially soft bottom end of the labour market?

A few things have improved, but there are also a large number of people who are still missing out. This is especially true of the unskilled, the casual and young people – the people who were at the pointy end of WorkChoices. The same people who got screwed under the Keating/Hawke reforms.

After the disaster of the Latham campaign, the Union movement knew it needed to get rid of Howard. So they brought in a PR firm, Essential Media Communications, to advise on creating a grass roots campaign. It’s called astroturfing, and it worked a treat.

Your Rights At Work got rid of John Howard, so after November 2007 it was allowed to fizzle, splutter and die.

Sure, there were a few half-arsed campaigns with little or no follow through at the local level and the odd mass email just to keep up appearances, but the union movement was never really serious about creating an ongoing community campaign.

The reality is that the union movement couldn’t organise its way to the shops, which is why they brought in the consultants.

How do I know this? I worked on the Your Rights At Work campaign.

This pattern is continuing with some unions now getting a contractor to do core union work – signing up new members.

In terms of creating a solid protection for working conditions the Your Rights At Work campaign failed. All it did was elect Rudd. Forget all the dribble about Kevin 07 and climate change, the only game in town in November 2007 was Your Rights At Work – it shifted tens of thousands of votes to the ALP where it mattered.

But it didn’t protect Award conditions – Julia Gillard’s Award ‘simplification’ is taking working conditions away. People that were screwed under WorkChoices will be screwed under Fair Work Australia.

Mighell is right; the union movement would be better off if it wasn’t just a work-experience factory for ALP staffers and would-be politicians.

The Liberal Party likes to foam at the mouth about the amount of money the union movement gives to the ALP, but they miss the point.

Most of this money is simply club membership to keep the union movement inside the tent pissing out. The politicians always end up playing the ACTU and their affiliates like a violin.

Club-busters like Mighell will go nowhere in the union movement, which is built on a scared rabbit inward, defensive, almost paranoid, consensus that totally misunderstands the nature of modern society.

In the meantime the money the union movement gives to the ALP, so that the Rudd government can keep kicking working stiffs like you and I, is pretty obviously lousy value. That is if the union movement’s core mission is to protect working rights, as opposed to getting on in politics.

Don’t get me wrong; this is far from an endorsement of the Liberals – especially under Abbott. It is merely pointing out that neither of the major parties are seriously interested in the lot of working stiffs as anything more than ballot fodder, and as consuming machines to keep the big mortgage holding banks and retailers happy.

Outside of that the government, whoever is in power, is hell bent on crunching down the price of labour. In a service-based economy where you don’t need anyone with too many brains or skills it spells bad news for future living standards for the majority of us.

Now, if we had a union movement that was prepared to oppose this economic ‘consensus’ - as Mighell suggests - the prospects for my friends working bar, waiting table and wiping old folks arses would be brighter.

As it stands, they are screwed whoever wins this election.

Ho Bloody Ho

A vision of things to come was provided for us in New Zealand this week, with the Singaporean Government using security guards to belt a few union organisers in Palmerston North. The union folk were trying to get a better redundancy deal for some call centre workers whose jobs are flying off to Manila for the duration. When the ACTU described call centres as the "sweat shops of the 21st Century" they weren't kidding. In a time honoured fashion plod has decided to charge the union organiser for repeatedly headbutting a security guard's fist. A fan of this sort of harmonious social interaction between labour and capital, Mr Peter Hendy, has packed his comb-over and left the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry - where he did such a sterling job defending WorkChoices with such success at the recent elections - and has gone onto the staff of the obviously doomed Dr Brendan Nelson. The good Doctor appears intent on surrounding himself with intellectual and social winners in much the same way that General George Custer surrounded himself with the 7th Cavalry at Little Big Horn. Why Nelson would plumb for such a Capital L Loser as his chief of staff is anyone's guess - perhaps no one else wanted such a poisoned chalice. Meanwhile, back in the real world, we slouch towards Bethlehem and K Mart as the annual festival of consumption rattles apace. I am avoiding Sydney until this whole thing blows over as I have reports of how that whited sepulchre is descending into a hell hole of third world proportions. It appears, from reports, to be suffering from an epidemic of 'Freedman's Disease' - a condition named after the frontman for the band The Whitlams - symptoms include a vastly exaggerated sense of self importance, a propensity for impotent violence, and a vacuous worshipping of of middle class banality. A town where creativity is competition and the nearest thing to a soul is on the bottom of your shoe is best avoided. After all, the next big thing planned is the post Christmas sales, where mild mannered people claw and scratch at each other to get hold of 'stuff'. It makes cargo cult riots in Papua New Guinea seem mild by comparison. We live in dark days indeed. The one redeeming feature was confirmation this week of something I had hitherto suspected for some time - this report from the delectable Annalee Newitz reveals that humans are not much smarter than dogs or monkeys. I believe that monkeys are probably, and dogs certainly, a lot smarter; as any witnessing of a post Christmas sale will evidence. The blog that never sleeps will be continuing to spew forth right through the festering season. These are the last days, and someone needs to keep these clowns accountable.

Tool Of The Week - Gerard Henderson

The increasingly erratic Gerard Henderson took time out from being paddled by his chums down at the Sydney Institute this week to fulminate against people being paid a living wage.

This will not do, thundered Henderson, who continues to believe that only good looking chaps from decent schools should be allowed to speak in public.

Henderson was railing against the Harvester Judgement, the one piece of social policy that stopped Australia from becoming another Argentina.

This deranged sociopath was foaming at the mouth in the Sydney Morning Herald this week because someone dared celebrate the foresight in a bloke called Higgins deciding a hundred years ago that people were born to live, not just to make rich men richer.

Not that we’d expect Henderson to grasp this, the bastard has never done a day’s work in his life. Preferring to fellate any nutjob roaming the land with a baseball bat looking for working people of an independent bent to belt.

He sucked up to Howard as if that grubby little rodent was capable of doing anything more than fixing his own breakfast.

He cheered for WorkChoices so that bottom feeders could pay teenagers $3 an hour legally under Howard’s laws.

He doesn’t like Harvester because he believes that Government’s should pick up the tab if people aren’t being paid enough to live. Yet this is the same pea brained onanist who believes in that miserable piece of government-sanctioned thuggery, welfare to work, which is doing exactly the opposite.

It is also curious that this dalek-like acolyte of the market sees the state as picking up the bill that his tight a#se huddle of degenerate losers down at the club aren’t prepared to pay. He is obviously a frustrated socialist.

This creep likes to paint himself as an academic, but in reality he has all the intellect and social utility of a broken sewer main, but is not nearly as pleasant. He is an intellectual coward - the sort of insecure martinet that likes to think he can bully people into believing his rather bizarre worldview.

This soaring Tool Of The Week, like his toilet trading pal Tony Abbott, believes it is better if you and I get treated like a shovel than be treated with dignity. He believes it is better that we get paid three-fifths of naff all rather than the poor employer be forced to pull their son out of Riverview.

Henderson is one of those useless loops that think employers should only have to pay what they can afford to pay. Let’s take this logic to its conclusion. I, as a consumer, have only $58 for groceries this week. So how about I load up my trolley with over $200 worth of goodies and when I get to the checkout say, “Well, I only have the capacity to pay $58 so, taking the advice of Gerard Henderson, I am only going to pay that”.

Quite rightly I’d be marched out of the store by a security guard, as Hendo should be marched out of Australia's consciousness.

Jerks like Henderson need to wake up to the fact that we live in a society made up of people, not businesses, and that if democracy is to mean anything it needs to serve the interests of human beings first and that narrow section of society called the business community second.

And he needs to stop it, or he will go blind.

WorkChoices Is Dead; Long Live WorkChoices

In what is looming to be a tactical victory for the Rudd Government, with accidental benefits for working Australians, Kevin Rudd has made dismantling WorkChoices a "priority". The announcement came out of Yesterday's (December 18) Cabinet meeting, where the reality of the Your Rights At Work campaign must have been laid bare for even the technocrats to understand. The Liberals are, of course, all over the place on the issue. Wets like Chris Pyne are glad to see the back of it, while Joe Hockey has declared it "dead" -meanwhile The Dead Rev, Kevin Andrews, has sprung out of his coffin to declare that it's all the way with WorkChoices still. "[Is] what we believed was for the good of Australia is no longer the case," was The Dead Kevs rhetorical question, to which this blogger poses the rhetorical answer "was WorkChoices good for any country?". The answer, of course, being no. The wrong Kevin will discover that the people have spoken if he only refers to a copy of any newspaper dated on or after November 25. It's a brilliant bit of work by Rudd & Coy. The Libs will either be wedged and forever known as the party that backs paying 16 year olds $3 an hour, or they roll over and let his, admittedly limited, roll-back go through the senate. The Libs best bet is to refer it to a senate committee in the hope that some sections of the union movement use that as an opportunity to embarrass Rudd and Coy. and expose just how many problems for working people they are leaving on the statute books. The crux of the issue is that there is a great deal of WorkChoices that will remain - the prohibition on union right of entry being the most glaring one - while many other areas; such as unfair dismissal laws, prohibited award content and the Gestapo-like Building and Construction Commission; will receive a partial, limited and delayed roll-back, if at all. We won't be going back to the lifestyle our parents enjoyed. So the inexorable trudge towards a third world lifestyle continues apace. In twenty five years of employment I've had one paid vacation, and this will become the norm for my generation and those that come after. It's pretty obvious we're going backwards. While the Liberal Party wanted to kill organised labour it appears the modern ALP is happy to watch us die by the death of a thousand prohibitive sub-clauses. Wouldn't it be great if the unions got together and formed a party to act in the interests of working people? Oh, I see we've already tried that. Well, plan B anyone?

The Balcony Scene

Lots to move through this evening as we peruse the wreckage of what will forever be known as the Black Weekend Of Horror, and it's only 9.30 Sunday night.

Balconies and fireworks' factories don't normally rub shoulders, but they did this weekend when there were too many shoulders a-rubbin.

The carnage started when a shop awning collapsed in a torrential storm at Balgowlah, killing an unsuspecting Craig Taylor, 53, who was described by his family as a "fantastic human being".

AAP reports that 'investigators' will examine if the weight of pigeon droppings left after years of roosting in the hollow awning contributed to its fatal collapse.

Blame also fell upon the continuing ferocious weather that has led to the SES receiving 359 calls for assistance across the state.

I find this rather scary as I live about a metre from a pigeon infested balcony. Hang in there building, I need this place. My fire inspection scheduled for Tuesday is scary enough. As an anarchist I'm wary about such things.

I mean, it can't be for my benefit, as society is full of entrapments designed to kill me off, from MSG to mobile phones.

Well, at least according to the fine print.

Then on Saturday night in Surry Hills someone was having a house party - never heard of that before - when, whooshka bang, and seven people are carted off in meat wagon to St Vincent's and the RPA for their sins after a balcony gave way and crashed to the ground.

Someone probably put on Plastic Bertrand. That'd make sense. All those cokehead yuppies would be smashed by 10.30pm.

According to AAP (again) about 50 people were at the party on Saturday night in Smith St, in Surry Hills, when the balcony collapsed at the back of the premises around. Their injuries ranged from cuts and bruises to a broken arm, a broken ankle and back injuries.

Then the carnage got weird - on Saturday seven people were injured - three seriously - when a balcony collapsed at a house in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne.

Luckily all this carnage is good business. Archicentre - the building advisory arm of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) - took the opportunity to issue a warning about unsafe balconies and decks.

Further Whooshka bang happened closer to this blogs' abode when Wallerawang got the sort of entertainment reserved for Harbour Bridges on New Years Eve.

The police bomb squad attended the scene at Wallerawang, near Lithgow, and thjough the cause remains a mystery it hasn't stopped the media howling that there were "suspicious circumstances" surrounding the impromptu cracker night.

The company? Howard and Sons.

Mr Howard explains.

"These fireworks, they're professional fireworks and they're not deemed to be extremely sensitive in that capacity," he said.

"[They] really require ignition or an ignition source, or a fire or sparks of some nature, to set them off."

Well, that's a relief. I'd never have thought of that about firecrackers, would you? This man is an expert.

When the Dane pondered Man as "How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, how like a god in apprehension" he wasn't referring to this guy.

Amidst all this architectural mendacity a slimy banking monster decided to rise from the deep

Westpac Banking Corporation's boss David Morgan said exposure to competition from foreign banks was good for Australian banks.

For competition, read buying up one of the big four. You heard it here first - the banks are selling up and getting out. That's a vote of confidence in our economic future if ever I've seen one.

My advice is to gather together everything of value and keep it secreted in a good strongbox buried very deep.

David Morgan is set to retire - as should I if I continue to peddle this tripe as news - the difference being Mr Morgan will have considerably more digits in his bank account when he joins John Howard and pulls on the plus fours.

"This country has given me unbelievable opportunity and I want to give back to this country and to people who are starting life or going through life without the same extraordinary good fortune that I have."

We know it has - that's the problem.

Luckily Doonesbury is in fine fettle, and keeping things in perspective in the forthcoming presidential primary race - which is descending into who is going to wrestle the fiddle off Nero.

The one beacon of hope that emerged all weekend was a stirring performance by the Katoomba Krushers fourth grade cricket side, where we rallied after being dismissed for 36 in our first innings to skittle Gentlemen of Hazelbrook relatively cheaply, and yours truly managed to bat out the day for over 90 minutes and put us in a reasonable position to go for the outright.

As a batsman with an average that looks like the half life of Khomeinium, it was no mean feat. I cannot continue my not out innings next week as I am attending the wedding of This Man.

We do wonderful things for our friends.

The ACTU agrees, they've decided to agree with me and have told the ostriches how it is.

They said voters last month had rejected the former government's election advertisements against unionists.

"What we'll be doing is talking to the government and those people who are responsible (for workplace relations)," Jeff Lawrence, who is numba wan union pela these days - said today. Which isn't much - but it's something.

Things are looking up for our heroes amidst the carnage

Tool Of The Week: The Nutty Professor

Paul Gollan is one of those bottom feeding caricatures of a human being spewed out by the classical school of economics.

He has an opinion piece in the Canberra Times this week pleading for his beloved WorkChoices to be saved in all but name in the spirit of 'compromise'.

Well, if economics is the dismal science then Gollan is downright murky.

This bottom feeder tearfully asks that employers keep the right to pay kids three dollars an hour.

Now Gollan might think child abuse is OK - and given his many contributions on the subject he has probably already sold his own kids for medical experiments on the basis of maximising rent on labour.

Gollan agrees that WorkChoices was the single biggest issue that led to Howard's defeat (no argument there) but that this only "arguably" gives Rudd a mandate to do anything about it.

Instead the Gollan warns that Rudd risks anger from the business community (read his kiddy fiddling mates), as if they live on a separate planet from the community we live, breathe, work, sleep and play in.

His solution is WorkChoices Lite - WorkChoices in all but name. Expect to hear more bottom feeders like our Nutty Professor start to sell this "solution". All backed up with the garbage economics that equates human life with all the hope, sense of purpose and dignity of a shovel.

Gollan and his shirt-tucked-in-the-underpants mates simply don't "get it".

The underpinning of the Australian way of life has been - until the greed driven layabouts from the corporate sector got their way - that wages and conditions are determined collectively. We either all go forward together or society fragments as it has under Howard, with some people getting ahead at the expense of the vast majority of the rest of us that have watched our standard of living head south for the last ten years.

Until eggheads like the Gollan get it into their heads that markets reduce human life to something nasty, brutish and short we will still have this voodoo economics shoved in our faces.

Of course you're going to create jobs if you destroy collective agreements that regulate things like shift rosters and apprenticeships and allow people to be paid three dollars an hour - that's just great for everyone except for the person with the job, their landlord, the small businesses they're supposed to buy from, the welfare agencies that have to support them, the utilities that expect them to pay bills and the kids that have to grow up in these households made up of Gollan's working poor.

If lunatic theorists like Gollan were forced to, say, clean toilets for a living they might just get a perspective on life that would stop them dribbling this inane garbage.

ALP Boss: It Was WorkChoices What Won It

ALP National campaign director Tim Gartrell's rather illuminating address to the National Press Club this week was remarkable for both what he said and what was illustrated by what he omitted. It wasn't a searingly frank assessment of the ALP campaign and I doubt anyone expected such from this 'disciplined' electoral machine. But he did mention, and go on to re-mention nine times, the WorkChoices laws. It was obviously central to the defeat of the Howard government, ranking above any other policy area he mentioned. It was the only distinct area of policy he identified apart from Interest Rates. The general thrust of his analysis is best summed up when he said "WorkChoices were attracting very large numbers of voters in the 45-65 age band who had previously voted for the Coalition", and "Labor’s messages about WorkChoices and industrial relations and ending the blame game in health crossed all demographic boundaries", or "Labor won seats with a high proportions of labourers - seats like Blair, Braddon, Flynn, Page and Wakefield but also in seats with high proportions of blue collar workers, including technicians and trades people, machinery operators and drivers". And why?

They were under financial pressure. They were worried about WorkChoices. They were worried about their kids’ future.

He also explodes another myth that can best be described as "what economic boom?"

What the Government didn’t understand was what Kevin Rudd knew – that people are doing it tough; particularly in outer-metropolitan and regional areas where our feedback was that family finances were tightening significantly.

This is where Gartrell's analysis gets interesting. Was it the ALP that led the community opposition to WorkChoices? Did the ALP run a two-year marginal seat campaign highlighting the impact of workchoices? Did the ALP create the groundswell of unease out there in the community that shifted votes? Of course not. That role was played by the community driven Your Rights At Work campaign, which Tim forgot to mention. He did mention that the ALP committed to getting rid of WorkChoices - except for unfair dismissal laws, prohibited content, comprehensive awards, union right of entry, etc. etc. I don't think Tim is an ostrich in the sense that so many of the media from another planet are. I think he knows damn well where and how that election was won, and it certainly wasn't from Centenary House. As he mentions in his concluding statements, this election was won because the ALP stood on the shoulders of others. Those 'others' where the thousands of people in the community who organised around the Your Rights At Work Campaign. Tim did a good job of explaining the trees to us - he just couldn't see the forest.

"I know how I'm voting"

An interesting comment in Crikey this week from Shay Gordon-Brown, alluding to matters psephological.

Shay remarked on the large number of people who refused to take a how to vote flyer from any of the volunteers handing out for all the parties and the Rights Art Work campaign, insisting that they "know how they are voting".

It was remarkable and the first time I had seen this phenomena in 27 years of working on polling booths. The only thing I can put it down to is the extraordinary long campaign - effectively close to 18 months - meant many people had already made up their minds well in advance, as was pointed out by many commentators and pollsters prior to the election.

In any event one would expect a rise in the informal vote with many people not having a how-to-vote card and the difference between the recent election and the State Election a few months back, where voters could use optional preferential voting and just mark one box.

Well, as Shay points out, the informal vote actually fell approximately 25% on the previous result; 2007 approx 3.84%, 2004 5.18%, 2001 4.81%. Shay used the seat of Dickson - where he was a volunteer - but his statements rang very true, so I thought I'd have a look on the local front.

Lo and behold if the informal vote in Lindsay didn't drop a whopping 2.4%, something like the margin intellectual powerhouse Jackie Kelly held it by. It can't have been the ALP candidate, as the same candidate ran last time as well.

Was it the much gibbered about Latham factor? That would seem likely, as it's hard to think of how 2.5% of the vote could change accidentally. Maybe people who couldn't bring themselves to back the ALP last time finally cracked this time under the joint pressures of mortgage stress and WorkChoices?

But then again, in neighbouring Macquarie the informal vote dropped less than half a percent to be very close to the national average, which would make you think that the situation in Lindsay was candidate related. Bradbury did run a better campaign this time it must be admitted.

As usual, this sort of real world insight has been completely ignored by the psephological commentariat. Clowns like Malcolm Mackerras - who reminds me of the nutjob muttering to himself outside Coles on a Saturday Morning.

In the meantime Shay Gordon-Brown concludes with a telling observation:

I’ve pretty much worked the same booths for the past 10 years and the difference in this election to the previous federal and state campaigns was significant in terms of people demonstrating their intent both in public and in private. From a numbers game it seems to me that 1% of the population is a pretty significant number considering the swing required to change government was only 5%.

The Full Nelson

If ever you wanted confirmation that the ALP is prepared to play both sides of the fence over the Your Rights At Work v WorkChoices battle then check out nelsonfacts.com It's an attack website put together by the national secretariat of the ALP. The site pretty much spends its entire energy ripping into new Liberal Leader and current Tool Of The Week Brendan Nelson for his support of the WorkChoices laws. The site is Authorised by ALP National Secretary Tim Gartrell, who was fellated in a nauseating piece in the SMH over the weekend as if he personally was responsible for getting rid of the Howard Government, rather than the thousands of ordinary Australians in the Your Rights At Work campaign who actually DID make a difference. I mean, after all, all Tim had to do was turn up on election night - the heavy lifting had been done out in the marginals for him. Left to his own devices he would have given us a repeat of his brilliant performance in the 2004 campaign, where he succeeded in making the Liberal Party look attractive enough for them to get control of the senate. If the laws are as bad as Mr Gartrell and the Federal secretariat of the ALP say they are, then why is the ALP government sitting on their hands whistling Dixie as if WorkChoices isn't a very real problem faced by working people STILL. And the very modest changes they are proposing (that won't take effect for half a year at the earliest) do nothing to help people who:

• Are forced to sign an AWA to get a job in the next six months
• Want the union to visit their workplace to help organise co-workers
• Work in the building industry and wish to keep union matters confidential (gaolable offence if they refuse)
• Work in the building industry and want to promote their union at work
• Want to include content now prohibited in collective agreements, such as union training.
• Have the conditions Tim Gartrell is so keen to promote ripped out of their work agreements

In the meantime don't speak up - you can still be sacked under Howard's laws for at least another six months, probably longer if we take the word of Julia Gillard. What we are seeing here is a grade one, first class exercise in hypocrisy. The ALP was quite happy to hide behind the Your Rights At Work campaign to get into office - now they are there they are not exactly exerting themselves to protect Australians who are under the gun with these new laws. It's a cynical, gutless exercise that will blow up in their face if they're not careful.

"When we said we'd rip up WorkChoices, what we really meant was..."

On the Monday prior to the recent election John Howard said he was happy for the 2007 poll to be a referendum on WorkChoices. It was good that he was happy, because that is exactly what it had become by then anyway. The Your Rights At Work campaign showed that community campaigns do work; if the community is engaged. Just over 12,500 people across NSW got involved in the campaign. These were people, separate from the ALP, who came from all walks of life - many who had never been involved in a political campaign in their lives - who took the fight for rights at work to the streets, shopping centres, train stations, festivals and community events of our nation. If you weren't engaged at some stage by the Your Rights At Work campaign you simply weren't living in Australia for the last 18 months. It was a brand that was everywhere. And what carried that brand? Ordinary people. And many of these people had borne the brunt of WorkChoices - they'd had their incomes slashed, been sacked unfairly, had their rosters go all over the place and been bullied and intimidated by employers that took Howard's laws as a green light for bastadry. If you want examples I have heaps and am happy to share them. Which is what makes Julia Gillard's statements about not being in a rush and being "careful and measured" so sickening. Those same employers will read this gutlessness as a further green light to continue to treat human beings like shovels to be picked up and put down when needed. We are seeing this already, most notably with Telstra. What part of the phrase 'rip up WorkChoices' doesn't the Rudd-Gillard government understand?

• A credible survey has shown that WorkChoices was the reason why 5.6 percent of voters shifted their vote to the ALP
• It is highly unlikely that Kevin Rudd would be Prime Minister now if it wasn't for the Your Rights At Work campaign.
• Neither Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard or any other ALP politician has mentioned the Your Rights At Work campaign in any report since the election, let alone thank and acknowledge both the people and the community campaign that worked incredibly hard put them where they are today.

This is, of course, being aided and abetted by the ignorant ostriches in our pathetic media, who must live in some parallel universe where the Your Rights At Work campaign never happened. The Your Rights At Work campaign WILL continue. We are not going away just so that Krudd and Gillard can schmooze the Australian business community - the community we live in comes first.

Tool Of The Week: Have We Got Principles!

"Those are my principals, if you don't like them, I have others." - Groucho Marx.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for the Liberal Party along comes Doctor Brendan Nelson – ex Union Boss, ex ALP Member, ex progressive, in fact it’s probably just best if we think of him as our ex.

The quantum leap in faith taken by the Liberal Party is best summed up by another front-runner for this week’s Tool Of The Week, Tony Abbott, who saw the rise of the good Doctor as an opportunity to announce his own future plans to pick up the pieces after the inevitable train wreck we can all see coming.

Dr Nelson has taken up some very reasonable positions in the past; about gay rights, Aboriginal land rights and education, opposition to mandatory sentencing laws, supporting safe injecting rooms and telling it how it is on the Iraq war (it’s about the oil, stupid).

Indeed, Dr Nelson is a man of principal, but if you don’t like those principals he has others.

Think we’re exaggerating? Sydney University’s vice-chancellor, Professor Gavin Brown, described Dr Nelson as “an example of ambition overriding principal”.

The new leader of the Liberal Party is someone who said that he would feel “comfortable” in the Labor Right.

He has come a long way since Arch-conservative former Treasury secretary John Stone described him as “a political hermaphrodite”; while Greg Barns, former staffer to John Fahey when he was Federal Finance Minister, who described Dr McNelson as “totally manufactured”.

Chris Bonner, President of the NSW Secondary Principals Council, gave an insight into the intellectual colossus that is the good Doctor when he said that the then Education Minister, criticised practices there was no evidence of, and came up with policy solutions already being carried out.

He voted for the Iraq war, which we were told at the time were because of WMD’s and Saddam Hussein’s cruelty, then it was only this year he made international headlines ‘fessing up it was about the oil.

He also told us earlier this year that there was “no such thing as victory in Iraq”.

Sydney Lawyer and former Liberal Party member Ifran Yussuf, who was intimate with Dr Nelson’s preselection in 1995, said “Nelson had the kind of flexibility that enabled him to both support and oppose identical policy proposals and still sound completely credible. Issues didn’t matter. What mattered was who was listening and how many votes they could swing.”

Mr Yussuf also revealed he had conversations with Dr Nelson where the doctor presumably read something into Mr Yussef’s name and slammed Israel for its ongoing occupation of the West Bank.

Current NSW Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell recalled to the Sydney Morning Herald in December 2005 that when he was state Liberal party director and Dr Nelson was looking to go into politics, the doctor was really only interested in a safe seat.

Mr O’Farrell also predicted Dr Nelson was “capable of going the whole way in politics”.

What qualities make someone capable of going the whole way in politics, Mr O’Farrell did not say, but the ability to change one’s fundamentally held beliefs in the pursuit of power might be one.

It’s pretty obvious that the dedicated follower of fashion has done a deal with the “uglies” in the ultra-right wing of the NSW Liberal Party, re-branding himself as McNelson - the man who will do whatever it takes to climb the greasy pole of power.

And what a fine bunch he has decided to throw his lot in with.

The secretive cult, the Exclusive Brethren was caught out in February giving thanks for Dr Nelson’s support. A report in the Age newspaper revealed a conversation between Brethren figures, including cult chief Bruce Hales, about a meeting with Dr Nelson which resulted in “unexpected recognition” and favourable treatment.

In this case it was an exemption from testing of computer literacy for students in Brethren schools. Given the written threats the Brethren peddled around during the recent election campaign it looks like he gave the god-botherers an exemption from written literacy as well.

Aside from the nut job religious right, Dr McNelson is also making the right noises for the Party’s free-market ideologues.

Despite admitting the electorate had roundly rejected WorkChoices, he says unfair dismissal laws should not be brought back.

Nelson may have presided over cuts to education, supported nuclear power, voted for the Iraq war, screwed up a multi-billion dollar defence purchase and may be back-pedalling furiously on the ALP’s mandate to rip up WorkChoices, but hey, maybe he doesn’t believe any of this stuff.

After all, a man whose principles can bend like a garden hose on a hot day probably doesn’t believe in anything. Maybe he is taking the free-market mantra of ‘flexibility’ and applying it to facts, beliefs and ideas?

It certainly looks that way.

Look forward to an opposition that will show all the backbone of a garden slug, but with none of the attractiveness.

And with lunatic number one, Tony Abbott, waiting in the wings, the good Doctor’s reign is likely to provide much needed comic relief in the Federal sphere before he takes the Liberal Party right off the rails.

Las Sus Derechas En El Trabajo

If anyone doubted the depth and reach of the Your Rights At Work campaign then prepare to be enlightened.

Here's a good friend, Tanya, at Machu Picchu in Peru, continuing a thousand year tradition of Inca rights at work.

We are the people Milton Freidman warned you about and we are everywhere.

Thanks to reader Steve, for sending in the pic!

Which gets me to thinking - why not send in your own Your Rights At Work pictures from weird and wonderful places, and we'll put them up here on the blog.

We are not a marketing exercise - this machine is made of people!

Another Ostrich

Peter Hartcher joins the queue of the clueless in today's Sydney Morning Herald, flailing around as to why we kicked Howard out because of the myth that this is a 'booming' economy. The economy is NOT booming for most of us - we are just getting deeper in debt. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has pointed out that one in five households earns less than $20,000 a year, with half earning less than $37,000. What sort of economic boom do you celebrate when half the country is on $700 a week or less? It was the Your Rights At Work Campaign stupid: When 12,500 people mobilise on an issue they will change a government, as the Your Rights At Work Campaign did. Now, can all the commentators take a deep breath and stop trying to rewrite history; and can journalists be forced to spend some time in the real world please?

How To Build An Imbecile III

The astonishing thing about Graham Young is not that he's the chief editor of Online Opinion, or that he's vice-president of Queensland Liberal Party, or even that he's wrap up of the election was published in the satirical newspaper, TheAustralian; no the really astonishing thing is that this bloke has enough brain cells to remember how to breathe. Here's another Ostrich, with his head in the sand, ignoring the unpalatable truth that the Your Rights At Work Campaign is a machine made of people, thousands of 'em. Young is another dill peddling the spin doctor's myths. Just how dissolute this reaction is can be measured by the fact that even the Washington Post gets it, 14,000 kilometres away from the end of Graham Young's nose, as this excellent piece from E.J. Dionne Jnr (now that's a Septic handle if ever I heard one) explains.

How To Build An Imbecile II

The rewriting of history continues apace this week with the latest theory given oxygen being Christian Kerr's assertion over at Crikey that it was all the Lindsay fake-flyer business what won it for Rudd. Yeah, that makes sense. A campaign involving 180,000 ordinary Australians shifts 5.6 percent of the vote, but really it was just a crazed Dentist from Penrith. Christian likes to think he's ever so witty, with the occasional bon-mot sprinkled amid the whacky myths he likes to popularise, but usually he's about as funny as a dead baby's doll - and another good example of how even alternative journalism is riddled with the same pretentious plummy prats that clog up the mainstream media. Unaccountable, unreliable, self-serving and - as this instance shows - often just plain wrong. For those that came in late, it was the Your Rights At Work campaign that won it - along with the thousands of ordinary Australians that got off their arses and did something about WorkChoices. But the politics industry can't be seen to thank them, there's no billable hours in that.

What Have The Unions Ever Done For Us?

From the people that brought you the weekend comes...

Silence Speaks Volumes

The ongoing silence from the new powers that be doesn't auger well for working stiffs, as Rick Kuhn points out in today's Canberra Times. If it can be pointed out in a Rural Press flagship then the ongoing triumphalism of the spin doctors bobbing up in pieces like this one from Andrew West in the SMH can be even more depressing for the footsoldiers in the Your Rights At Work army. Focus groups are all well in good in fashioning your message - and it is a lucrative way to fill the carpet bag - but it all counts for nothing if you can't then get that message out. This is where the tens of thousands of word-of-mouth activists came in. Focussed on 24 marginal seats they, as I pointed out on Monday, won 22 with one still in doubt. And they did this as volunteers - giving up hundreds and thousands of hours for free, reaching into parts of society where the ALP's message couldn't go - at least not in that one-on-one sense that proved so valuable. This campaign had it's TV ads and T shirts - make no mistake they made a difference - but at its core was thousands of conversations between ordinary Australians, where Your Rights At Work activists went one on one with neighbours, family, friends and strangers alike to ensure the message sunk in. For the first time in a long time the union movement started speaking out into the community. As a result the campaign attracted many non-union members as supporters - concerned about the impact of these laws on their families and communities. It's a good time for the Labour Movement as a whole to realise that it's great strength is not a few spin doctors, operators and policy wonks - but it is actually a far more powerful group - thousands of ordinary people organised into a cohesive and effective voice. It's little wonder that those so seduced by power would be reluctant to acknowledge such a strong force even if it put them where they are today. A force like that could really derail the gravy train if they, quite rightfully, demanded the government address their concerns. No, better to pretend they didn't exist - or if they did then play down their role. Remind them of what power they do have and they might start to use it. In the end Kuhn may be right - and we may all discover that Rudd is nothing but a four letter word* * An idea courtesy of Tog's Place

Rewriting History

"It's time for a new page to be written in our nation's history." Kevin Rudd, November 24, 2007.

In the lead up to the 2007 Federal Election tens of thousands of ordinary Australians mobilised into a concerted campaign to change a government. These people re-wrote Australian history.

Yet, as soon as that victory was achieved, their efforts were all but ignored by, not just vast swathes of the media, but also by the ultimate beneficiaries, the incoming government.

The strength of the Your Rights At Work campaign comes from its acknowledgement by the defeated Liberal Party - federal director, Brian Loughnane, told media on the Sunday after the election that Work Choices had cost the Coalition key support, a statement echoed by Liberal MP and campaign spokesman, Andrew Robb.

ALP campaign director Tim Gartrell described WorkChoices as “the most important issue of the campaign”.

“It would have been more difficult to win without it.”

"I mean look at these young guys at the gate - you'd have been dragging them in here to vote last time,” said Graham Perrett, ALP Candidate for Moreton, while visiting a polling booth on election day. "This time they're here handing out cards on the rights at work issue.”

In the marginal seat of Eden-Monaro big swings were recorded in communities west of the great divide where WorkChoices was seen as a threat.

Polling done for the ACTU showed a 5.7% shift from Howard to Labor motivated by industrial relations as the key issue.

None of this would have happened without a concerted grass roots campaign - this was no astroturfing exercise - that saw the ACTU gather an email database of 180,000 addresses, from which a popular localised word of mouth campaign spread.

For over two years the Your Rights At Work campaign has been beavering away, under the radar, in 24 targeted coalition held seats.

Whether leafleting, letterboxing, doorknocking, forwarding emails, holding a street stall or collecting signatures, an army of campaigners braved everything from Darwin’s tropical storms to the snows of the Great Dividing Range to make sure that the impact of WorkChoices became issue number one across a vast swathe of middle Australians in marginal seats.

The Your Rights at Work bumper stickers, T-shirts and later house signs, became eponymous. These people were shifting voter sentiment where it mattered. Some media dismissed it as a cynical Trade Union scare campaign or stunt at best. The rest ignored it.

But the people involved in the campaign came from an extraordinary array of union and non-union backgrounds. There were the usual suspects, but there were more, many more, that became involved in a community campaign for the first time in their lives.

Many of these people took to it with a gusto lacking in the rank and file of both major parties. This is a newly politicised group of Australians, and they threw up some amazing champions.

One such example was Jo Jacobson, an articulate and savvy health worker who became the public face of the opposition to WorkChoices in the Penrith based seat of Lindsay long before the ALP had even settled on a candidate.

Many campaigners took to one-on-one conversations with their peers. In marginal Macquarie a ripped off hotel worker named Steve Eisenberger made a habit of wearing his Your Rights At Work T-shirt around his blue-collar mates - winning over a small coterie who had previously backed Howard over what are euphemistically referred to as ‘security’ issues.

There were thousands of Steve Eisenburgers operating across all sorts of groups - social, sporting, civic and cultural - to get the message out.

The word of mouth message cut through to an increasing number of Australians while Howard and Barbara Bennett remained as background white noise, drowned out by the wise words of their Your Rights At Work neighbour and their own experiences.

The community campaign was backed up by a shoestring (compared to the Federal Government’s) advertising campaign that re-enforced the word-of-mouth message.

Despite (or possibly because of) widespread support, many Your Rights At Work signs were stolen or defaced, as well as threats and acts of vandalism aimed at Your Rights At Work activists.

Still, the thousands of volunteers didn’t complain - instead they handed out their own How To Vote card on election day, separate from the major parties - in the rain, the sun, the heat, the wind. They made sure that WorkChoices was on the forefront of voter’s minds where it mattered.

Of the 24 targeted coalition held seats, the ALP won 20 and 3 are currently too close to call.

It’s an extraordinary achievement in anyone’s reckoning - so where is the acknowledgement to these Australians by either the media or the man holding the trophy, Kevin Rudd?

There was no direct mention of either WorkChoices or the Your Rights At Work campaign in the Hawker-Brittonesque pfaff that passed as Rudd’s acceptance speech.

Not much of a run in the media either. A bit of a go over at the SMAge, with Andrew West providing a bit of background in the SMH and a puff piece on the ACTU’s spin-doctors in the Age, while Mark Bahnisch and Wayne Errington in Crikey both nominated WorkChoices as a killer issue for the Coalition.

The last time a Prime Minister lost his seat - Stanley Melbourne Bruce in 1929 - it was to the secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall in a foretaste of the Your Rights At Work Campaign.

One of the key issues in 1929 was Bruce’s dream of smashing the union movement and regulated working arrangements based on fairness.

Australia said no to individual contracts in droves, and there was a landslide win to Labor. The depression hit and two years later Scullin’s Labor Government dissolved into dissent, panic and scandal.

The Rudd Government will now be faced with a plethora of conflicting policy objectives - one of which will be to screw down the price of labour. We all know that this will be borne by those least able to afford a cut in their living standards.

As early as the Sunday morning after the election Australian Business Council head Greg Bailey dismissed “fears” the union movement may hold sway over a Rudd government.

“If you listened to Kevin Rudd last night that is not an impression you would have got,” Bailey told the ABC, while over at Forbes Magazine CommSec chief equities economist Craig James said the Australian business community had been prepared for a Labor victory.

“In terms of economic policy, nothing really changes too much,” said James, in an observation that would have been news last week.

Rudd was on the 7.30 report blaming the Liberals “from day one” for threatening to be obstructive over repealing WorkChoices. They’ve already set up the fall guy and an alibi - the Senate.

Labor is said to be keen to recall Parliament to introduce its legislation to change the Howard Government's Work Choices laws, but just how keen remains to be seen.

"I hate to say it, but Costello was right when he said the new government will start rewriting history," Unions NSW secretary John Robertson told the SMH on Monday. "It's already begun and Rudd and company are out there saying it was health or education or climate change. Sure, it was a bit of all those, but the biggest issue was Work Choices."

I got a nice email from Sharan Burrow and Jeff Lawrence at the ACTU for my support for the Your Rights At Work campaign.

”Well done,” they said. “You have helped make history.”

Just like those who took on Stanley Melbourne Bruce did nearly eighty years ago.

Yes, Kevin Rudd - and the media - appears to want to write a new page in Australia’s History - a page where it is as if the tens of thousands of ordinary hard working Australians, who banded together as the Your Rights At Work Campaign and changed a government, never existed.

But after the success of our campaign so far, we are highly unlikely to go away.