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Workers Power Global, Melbourne, 16 November 2003
Attacks on the basic living conditions and rights of Australian workers continue apace. And it looked for a while like the trade union movement might be finally willing to fight.
Anti-union laws have been used to target militant unions like the CFMEU, dragging the union and its officers through hundreds of hours of Royal Commission and costly court cases. The government dragged the country into the extremely unpopular war in Iraq and is now expecting us to pay via our taxes and cuts to health and education. The Nelson Review will mean massive fees for tertiary education and loss of conditions for education workers. Attacks on Medicare mean that Australia's universal health care system will rapidly disappear.
Such an all-out assault on every aspect of life in Australia would seem to demand a fairly massive response from the organized working class. What we got from the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) was the Fair Go campaign. The campaign aims to create a "fairer Australia".
It's a broad based union and community campaign - and it appears also to be appealing to the lowest common denominator. One aim of the campaign is to "oppose the Federal Government attempts to introduce legislation that undermines the values that the union movement and other community organisations we believe are integral to a fairer Australia".
The big problem is how open-ended it leaves the question of what a fairer Australia would be - and fairer for who.
But despite this, on 11 November more than 10,000 people, mainly building, construction and metals union members, rallied and marched through the streets of Melbourne.
While some unions, like the NTEU, which has just been on strike, advertised the rally to members as a "community" action; the most militant sections of the movement clearly viewed the action as a stop work. They marched through the city chanting, "We're angry, we're loud; we're union and we're proud."
But what now?
It is clear even to the officials of the big unions and the ACTU that the working class in Australia is facing a barrage of attacks from all directions. In fact there are so many things to campaign around at the moment that there seems to be almost a feeling of exhaustion.
A united campaign which puts everything together, makes the links and shows how anti-union laws, cuts to education and medicare, Howard's war and the treatment of refugees are all part of the same bosses' offensive on the working class, is a good thing.
But it needs to be a campaign with some real direction and leadership and some fighting slogans.
The rallying call around health care has been to defend and extend Medicare - even the Moreland City Council can agree with that. In education the demand for free education remains key along with defence of the basic right of staff to belong to a union and have a collective contract - something that is currently under threat. Defeat of all the anti-union laws, including the new ones about to be introduced and defence of every unionist attacked under them is essential if working class organization is to survive.
None of these things are expressed by Fair Go!
Yet 10,000 workers on the streets of Melbourne in the middle of the week is testimony to the fact that people are both angry and prepared to take action.
National strikes by both teachers and tertiary staff in the last couple of months, plus a whole raft of industrial action in other industries, all shows that when the leadership leads, unionists are more than willing to defend their wages and conditions. Despite the concerted attempts of the Coalition government, the Australian working class is not defeated.
Possibly most significant of all, in the last few months there have been rank and file slates run in several union elections, and in at least two - the MUA and the Postal workers - these have succeeded in returning some officers.
This indicates that parts of the working class in Australia want to be in a position to be able to fight the stepping up of Howard's war at home and abroad. And that to do this they need a leadership that is willing to fight.
With next year being an election year, all of these things will be emphasized. Most of all because the Australian Labor Party will be desperately trying to win back the ground it has lost by tailing the Coalition on war, refugees and increasingly social policy as well.
Whilst the Socialist Alliance has a good profile among small sections of the most militant unionists, it is really in no position to compete with the Greens, who have increasingly encroached on the Labor left. A position that Greens Senators Bob Brown and Kerry Nettle solidified with their protests against George Dubya in the Federal Parliament.
And it is in this light that the recent election of Carmen Lawrence to the Presidency of the ALP, has to be seen. Lawrence has been an outspoken opponent of Australian involvement in Iraq and a defender of refugee rights. Her election can certainly be seen as a protest against the direction of the Party, from it's remaining left.
But like the Greens, whose policy on refugees and the war is certainly at least slightly better than the ALP's on paper, a question remains about where Lawrence stands union rights.
She was, for example, found in a recent survey to be one of the few ALP MP's who was not a member of a union. Whilst a largely symbolic act, these memberships have always been a symbol of the ALP's connection to the organized working class. Mere oversight on Ms Lawrence's part - or a sign of something deeper?
In the short term it seems clear that a large part of the active membership of the ALP is not happy with at least some of the directions the party seems to be heading and is desperate to make up the ground lost to the Greens. In the last election Kim Beasley looked like a man working over time to lose an election. Simon Crean has already faced at least one leadership challenge - the election of Lawrence is seen in some quarters as a direct threat to him also.
But in the coming months it won't be the machinations in caucus rooms that most affect the lives of ordinary Australians - it will be whether the power of the still substantial organized working class can be mobilized not just to walk up the street asking for a fairer go, but to actually fight to defend everything we already have and for real improvements.
For this we need rank and file organisations in all unions that will press for strike action and not confine protest to the symbolic gestures of the bureaucracy; We need a revolutionary transformation of the unions so that they are placed on a war-footing against the Coalition; and we need a revolutionary party that is prepared to link the current myriad of struggles to the struggle for workers power and the destruction of the bosses' state that wages war on working people at home and abroad.
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