Will Tasmania be the New Right's laboratory?

May 27, 1992
Issue 

By Steve Painter

Both sides in the bitter dispute at Associated Pulp and Paper's Burnie mill know this is a struggle over much more than the immediate issue of conditions in the mill, important as these are. Excited by huge blows dealt to the union movement in New Zealand, an important section of big business is pressing for a similar offensive in Australia.

Before the May 1991 state elections, NSW, the only Liberal-governed state, was shaping as the laboratory in which the New Right would attempt to repeat the New Zealand experiment. The Greiner government was preparing savage anti-union legislation, but by the time these laws were on the books, Greiner had unexpectedly emerged from the elections with a minority government.

With Greiner hobbled, NSW unions have so far been able to cope with the state's new laws, even winning some important judgments in the industrial court, though they are only in the early stages of what looks like being a long war of attrition. No large employer has felt inclined to pull on a big industrial confrontation in NSW with the state government unlikely to be of much help.

State elections

Stymied in NSW for the time being, the New Right appears to have become very excited over the Liberals' big win in February's Tasmanian elections. State Liberal Party president Eric Abetz, a powerful figure largely responsible for the installation of Ray Groom as premier in place of Robin Gray, got wide publicity when he told a meeting of the right-wing H.R. Nichols Society that the state under its new Liberal government could become an industrial relations pioneer.

Chamber of Commerce consultant Forbes Ireland went further, telling the same meeting that the island could become "a social laboratory to trial new projects and systems". Executives from APPM's parent company, North Broken Hill Peko, were present at this meeting, according to a report by Andrew Fisher in the May 12 Bulletin.

Abetz had some reason to get excited about prospects for a New Right offensive in the state, because in some ways Tasmania is a more suitable battleground than NSW. The union movement is much smaller, and Tasmania's economy is more dependent on resource industries, particularly timber-paper, mining-minerals processing and rural industries, in which the main New Right-managed companies are based. This is no accident; the hold of New Right views is stronger where vulnerability to world market fluctuations is higher and profit levels lower.

Also contributing to Abetz's enthusiasm was the fact that NBH-Peko was all geared up for its assault on ing apparently targeted the plant at least 18 months ago, when a group of the pulp company's managers visited the Robe River iron ore mine, in 1986 the site of the then Peko Wallsend's first full-scale attack on trade unionism. Burnie unionists say that very soon after the dispute erupted some APPM managers appear to have been sidelined and NBH-Peko staff moved in, including Robe River veteran Herb Larratt (La Rat to the mill workers).

Run down

Like Robe River in the mid-'80s, APPM is among the parent company's less profitable operations, returning about $7800 per worker per year compared to around $300,000 per worker per year in another subsidiary, Energy Resources of Australia. Profits were set to fall even further due to the federal government's tariff reduction program.

As well, APPM's pulping division is run down to the point that it needs large investment to modernise it. Such investment could be risky: world woodchip prices are low, and competition is fierce in pulping, particularly from mills in New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Indonesia and Brazil. A number of observers, including Green Independent MP Christine Milne, have accused the company of planning to close its pulping division and retain only the more profitable paper finishing (mainly coating and cutting) operations. The company imported one load of unfinished paper from the US in anticipation of the present dispute.

Probably another factor motivating the company to bring on the dispute was the thought that it might avoid its responsibilities to workers retrenched in the ongoing rationalisation process begun in cooperation with the unions in 1989. In the year to June 1991, redundancy packages cost APPM around $7 million, a figure that probably reached $12 million by the end of 1991. If the company gets away with a round of sackings as a result of the present dispute, it stands to save a tidy sum.

It seems NBH-Peko took the election of the Liberals as the political signal to put its plan into action, but it may have miscalculated. To the disgust of the federal Liberal Party, not to mention Abetz, Premier Groom seems to lack enthusiasm for this particular adventure of the New Right, and his government hasn't announced any plans for Greiner-style industrial legislation.

Populism

The permanently depressed Tasmanian economy forces both Liberal and Labor politicians to adopt a more populist brand of politics than their mainland counterparts. While Groom might sympathise with the company, for the time being he seems to have judged that it would not be shrewd politics to side with mainland and international mill owners (including Melbourne's blue-blood Baillieu family) against almost the entire population of one of the most important towns in the north-west.

Enthusiasts for the New Zealand model generally overlook the fact that it's not an approach that promises a long career to an ambitious politician. Labour, the first New Zealand champion of New Right politics, was devastated at the last elections, and its successor, the National Party government of Jim Bolger, is headed the same way.

Whatever happens, the Burnie dispute is shaping as a long struggle. The ACTU has committed itself to raise a $5 million fighting fund, while the company is rumoured to have set aside $30 million, and there's probably even more available from the New Right sources that funded Mudginberri, Dollar Sweets and other assaults on trade union rights.

Workers elsewhere, particularly those in other NBH subsidiaries and joint ventures, such as mining giant Pasminco, would do well to throw their full support behind the APPM workers. Pasminco is already in the early stages of what could develop into a similar assault. It has been retrenching workers in Broken Hill, wants to cut production and sell its Elura mine at Cobar, and also wants to sell its smelting operation at Cobar. Pasminco's declared aim is to get production costs down to the point that it can remain competitive regardless of fluctuations in world minerals prices. This can only mean further attacks on the work force are coming.

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