Transcript of speech given at the closing plenary session of the Now We The People conference, 24.8.03 University of Technology, Sydney

Leigh Hubbard

That was a very generous introduction; I don't know whether I would consider myself a major figure in the trade union movement, but nevertheless I'm glad to be with you today, and it's great that the Now We The People movement has got to a second conference, and hopefully there'll be a third in a year or so.

I'll be brief as I know it's been a long day from everyone. It's great to be up here from Melbourne, we watch with interest this conference, and I want to tell you about in just a few minutes about an initiative we've undertaken in Victoria that hopefully will link up with what you're doing here.

The first thing I want to do is reflect on the challenge we face and how we might better coordinate our efforts to create a new political agenda based around progressive values, and I do hope that the outcome of today's conference and other conferences around the country will be a new urgency for all of us from various states and movements to create a people's movement that demands progressive change of our politicians. And I think the anti-war movement is a good example of what we can do on the ground, in Victoria we had probably sixteen local groups, they were very active and those local groups are there sitting and ready and waiting to be turned into something much broader than simply an anti-war movement. And we've seen other examples in the anti-refugee policy movement as well.

And I'm actually pleased to see at the ACTU congress last week, and I've left some copies on the table out there, it's only a two page document, the ACTU congress actually adopted and promoted a charter of union values, and it's the first time we've done that for a long time.

I'd also refer you if you look at the ACTU website to the future strategies document that was released just before the congress which actually starts to say what the role of the unions ought to be in the wider society, beyond organising in the workplace, and beyond the vested interested which workers have and which obviously unions are there to promote and serve.

I've got to say as a word of caution I suppose about alliances, I mean from a trade union perspective, I think they're very important and I'll go into why and how we should be doing more…but I think there are a couple of things we ought to recognise and to take on Anthony's point about reflection and analysis, self-analysis.

One, we do not any longer have organisations that train the cadre, train the leaders like the communist party or others, we have a much more diffuse, and in maybe some ways that's a good thing, but we don't have the kinds of organizations that are training people and provide the intellectual capital, and in some respects our movement has been like a farmer eating his or her seeds over the past twenty or thirty years. And that is something we have to remedy, and whether that's by harnessing the kind of intellectual capital and research that was represented on the stage and in the forums today, or in other ways, we have to address that.

The second thing we need to recognise about the union movement is that it's not a homogenous sort of movement, it has right and left, conservative and radical, it has people who believe that the union's only role is in the workplace on narrow interests, and others who believe that unions have a much broader role as unions representing 1.8 million members and many more indirectly, we have a major role in every issue that affects Australian society. And I must say I'm in the latter camp, as I know some of the other unions officials, like Julius, who are here today do too.

British sociologist Richard Hyman who was famous for a book in themid-1970s on strike, recently wrote a paper about how the trade union movement can revitalise itself. An in it he makes a point, and that is that the trade union movement used to hold two swords (sorry, we're anti-war I know, but it's a bit of a war allusion. The first if the sword of vested interests on behalf of its members, and we've always exercised that, it's about wages and conditions and other things.

The second, though, is the sword of social justice, and he's very critical of the union movement for putting down that second sword over the last 20 or 30 years. And I think that's very true; while we as a union movement have had our moments here in Australia, things like East Timor and the anti-war movement, I think we haven't done well, probably since the mid-seventies when we ran major campaigns around Medicare and other things; we haven't done well in terms of creating those broader links and being seen to be a primary catalyst for social change.

And the union movement has provided very little counterbalance to the tendency of social democratic parties to shift further and further to the right. In fact, as factional players in the mechanisms of the ALP, many unions have aided and abetted that process. And I think that it's time that we picked up that sword of social justice with a vengeance.

I talked a bit about the adoption of a statement of union values by the ACTU Congress, but we can't remain isolationist in promoting simply union values, I don't think there is such a thing, I think there are values, and there a three or four values I just want to go through about that:

Firstly, union values aren't a special breed of values, there's very little - I agree with other speakers - in the list that I've handed out of union values that many other faith, community, environmental, peace and other organizations could not endorse or ascribe.

The second thing is that to maximise our strength and that's all of the interests reflected in this room, we need to link with like-minded individuals and organisations in the community. We live in strange times and that makes for strange bedfellows. I must say I was telling the story before about walking into Len Harris's office, the One Nation senator, recently when we were lobbying on some legislation in Canberra, and I'd come across him at the GATS/Free Trade Senate inquiry. He was there asking very good questions about the impact on indigenous culture that the free trade agreements would have, I must say while Aiden was sitting there in his room, but he was asking his question…Secondly we walk into his office and he's got an East Timorese scarf on his wall, thirdly he's touring Australia looking at small scale energy production from waste in small regional communities in Queensland, in cooperatives…He's a strange mixture.

So I think while none of us would ascribe to One Nation's scapegoating and its politics, we have to look for those sorts of alliances that Kerry Nettle referred to and others referred to. So strange times make for strange bedfellows.

The third thing is from a trade union perspective, we only have 23% of the workforce that's unionised. And to get to others, either who aren't unionised or who share our values, we have to find new ways of making alliances and new methods of connecting. For example students - 80% or 70% of full time students work. And yet we can't connect with them in the workplaces. We've got to go and make alliances with student organisations and on campuses. For example in Victoria we're looking at piloting a student worker centre at Monash university in Melbourne.

And I should add that while the unionised workforce is reduced, that doesn't mean we can't find sympathisers out there for either union issues or the broader political campaigns that we're all running. And I think if the MUA dispute as a great example of that where many of the people who came to the picket lines or were involved in it were not actually union members but they were sympathisers, whether they were from church communities or the environmental movement or whatever. I could go on about that.

The fourth thing we need to reflect on is what is the meaning of community any more, I think that's changed drastically. I think it's been both by choice, on the part of workers, to move away from their traditional communities and it's been forced on us in many ways in regional areas, by the closure of services and so on. But we just have to deal with that in the way we form alliances and campaigns. For example, in our own movement, maritime workers don't live in Port Melbourne or around the Port of Sydney any more. They don't live around the industrial areas. They might live 40 or 50 km away - how do you connect with them, how do you actually make those links, and I think that's something we have to invent new ways, whether it's the internet, whether it's other forms of connection.

The fifth thing is…[inaudible]…other community people, for example whether it's community groups complaining about the impact on children of excessive working hours, or whether people can't contribute to the community anymore. We need to form those alliances as a union movement.

International links: the other thing I think we need we need to be saying as a union movement is as capital globalises, so much the labor and progressive movements, and that's not just on labor issues, I think of the Rio Tinto campaign which is a very effective campaign, which drew together indigenous, environmental and union organisations to campaign around what Rio Tinto has done internationally.

The other thing I wanted to reflect on is that we're here representing various campaigns and I think we've got to go beyond that, to step up to a campaign around values, and that's why I started with this ACTU charter of values. What is it that we stand for as a diverse range of individual campaigns that we say is being undermined by the conservatives and neoliberals. And that's why I wanted to say what we're doing in Victoria, and it does reflect very much in what Now We The People is doing. We've called for this thing called the Fair Go campaign, calling for a fairer Australia, and there's a leaflet up the back, it's a colourful little leaflet and poster. That's the beginning of that campaign in Victoria, and I hope other states,and one of the things that I'll be talking to the organisers of this conferences about, is how do we link into that over the next six to twelve months.

That campaign is organisationally based, we've got about sixty organisations in Victoria that are part of it, including the Victorian Council of Churches, the Victorian Council of Social Services, and others, the Ethnic Community Council and so on. That is very much part of creating a national campaign. And I would hope that if we can work with Now We The People over the next six to twelve months that by early next year we should be able to try and bring together Now We The People things like the Australian collaboration (or I'd suggest that this is what happens) of the Fair Go campaign in Victoria and other states, to try and release or create some kind of national umbrella that ensure we're not working in competition or duplicating what we're doing, that we're actually cooperating. Because we really do need to concentrate on that one big enemy at the moment.

The last thing I wanted to quote was from Pat Dodson, who recently helped us launch the campaign in Victoria, last Monday in fact. He said recently "we've reached the sad state in this country where a person's worth and the assessment of the contribution that they might make as citizens is determined by a set of values that held sway in the time of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. And until such time as out Australian society's compassion and sense of justice matches our fascination with the behaviour of some of our sportspeople, we will be diminished as a people. That is a challenge for ourselves and as a nation."

And I think that very succinctly states why we need to campaignm why we need some new alliances. And we've got plenty to face in the next six months: Medicare, higher education, the sale of Telstra, and industrial relations, including the building industry, and I'm sure that all of us have a very strong, very vested interest in making sure those alliances go forward and go forward more strongly.

Thanks very much.

Leigh Hubbard is the Secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall Council

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