Postal balloting for national elections in the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) began on November 19 and will continue until December 10.
The incumbent officials are running as the "Stephen Jones Team" (a reference to incumbent CPSU national secretary Stephen Jones). Their propaganda is in some ways contradictory.
On the one hand they are standing on their record, claiming in their main leaflet to have won "pay rises consistently higher than the national average". Yet the same leaflet also says that "[a] decade of fragmented bargaining across the public sector has led to alarming disparities in pay", and promises to campaign for "Australian Public Service [APS]-wide arrangements to close the pay gaps".
Jones himself has been elected unopposed, reflecting a willingness by many CPSU activists to give him a chance to implement the policies contained in the recently adopted Agenda for Change, a document that takes up some of the ideas previously raised by critics of the CPSU leadership (such as campaigning to return to APS-wide bargaining).
However there are contested elections for a number of positions. Sam Byrne, a member of the Greens, is running for deputy national president against the two incumbents who are both members of the Stephen Jones Team. Byrne calls for a campaign for a 35-hour week and 26 weeks paid maternity leave. He opposes affiliation to the ALP.
Ben Kirkwood is running for deputy national secretary against the two incumbents. Kirkwood is opposed to ALP affiliation, but apart from that his politics are not clear from his statement on the union website.
Chris Slee is running for a position as representative of Australian Taxation Office members on the CPSU's governing council. He is critical of the union's response to the government's cuts to APS funding, saying that "while there were media statements from the CPSU leadership, there was no industrial campaign or mass public protest".
Slee also calls on the CPSU to "participate fully" in the campaign against anti-union laws.
Jonathan Sherlock is running for a position representing Centrelink workers on the CPSU governing council. He argues for building solidarity amongst workers at all levels — in each local workplace, across Centrelink, across the APS, and with all other workers in the campaign for better public services and for union rights.
In the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, a team of five — Paul Oboohov, Leigh Hughes, Matthew Gibbins, Silvia Liertz and Pillip Hilton — is running under the name Members First.
Oboohov told Green Left Weekly that Members First will work with the officials to implement the ideas in the Agenda for Change, but believes that only the mass involvement of members can ensure that these ideas are implemented in the face of opposition from the ALP government.