“The reason why the Labor Party was established was because the unions [knew] we needed to elect our own representatives to parliament to make the laws that cared for workers and their families...
“But in South Australia today what have we got? The complete opposite.
“Our Party... belongs to us and we’re going to take it back. The unions formed Labor to legislate for workers...
“We need to reshape Labor with a new leadership team...”
With those words, Wayne Hanson, state secretary of the AWU, the most conservative of Australia’s big unions, proposed a motion at the South Australian Labor Party conference in late 2010 to demand the resignation of Labor leader, and premier, Mike Rann.
When Rann made a government reshuffle in February, Janet Giles, secretary of “South Australia Unions”, repeated the call for Rann to quit on behalf of the state’s whole union movement. “All of today’s shenanigans are really the same boofhead politics we’ve seen for some time from this government”, she declared.
The stance of the South Australian unions is a model for how Britain’s unions should have responded to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in 1997-2010.
It is the exception in the Australian union movement; and developments in other states indicate that union members in South Australia need to take control of the anti-Rann campaign to ensure it is not satisfied with sops.
In New South Wales, the unions ran a big campaign against electricity privatisation, and in 2008 both blocked the scheme and forced the resignation of its architect, Labor premier Morris Iemma.
Once Iemma was gone, however, John Robertson, the secretary of Unions New South Wales, who had led the anti-privatisation campaign, became a Labor member of the Legislative Assembly and a minister in a Labor government carrying through modified privatisation and quickly becoming as right-wing as Iemma ever was. Robertson is now Labor leader in NSW.
A serious union response across Australia would mean unions debating and sticking to a clear set of working-class policies; campaigning on that basis against Rann, and also against Queensland premier Anna Bligh and federal prime minister Julia Gillard; and demanding ALP accountability to the working class.
But most of the “left” unions have gone quiet, leaving the political initiative to backroom deals and to right-wing AWU leader Paul Howes, who was one of the main figures in the dumping of Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd in June 2010 and his replacement by Gillard.
Bob Carnegie, currently running for election as Queensland branch secretary of the traditionally “left” Maritime Union of Australia, states in his latest leaflet:
“Under my leadership the MUA Queensland branch will not involve itself in ALP machinations over the heads of the membership.
“It will use the union’s representation in the Australian Labor Party, both at state level and nationally, openly to champion workers’ interests and challenge the ALP leaders. What the union says and does in the ALP will be democratically discussed and decided by MUA members.
“The MUA will speak out in the same way that South Australian unions are currently speaking out for the removal of Mike Rann as unworthy to be a Labor representative.
“It will not let issues drop once a token victory has been gained, as the NSW unions let issues drop once Morris Iemma had been ousted and his particular variant of electricity privatisation blocked”.
