Paul Oboohov, Canberra
On June 29, 200 people attended a public forum organised by Unions ACT at Old Parliament House to hear a range of speakers on Prime Minister John Howard's planned new anti-union laws.
Paul Munro, the retired vice-president of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC), denounced Howard's IR plan as "counter-revolutionary" in seeking to drag industrial relations back to the 19th century conservative ideal of direct contracts between individual employers and their employees. He lampooned Howard's proposed Fair Pay Commission as the "slow pay commission", comparing it to the 1982 pay freeze administered by Howard when he was treasurer in Malcolm Fraser's government.
ACT Labor industrial relations minister Katie Gallagher said that under the Howard plan 95% of the ACT's private sector, or 100,000 workers, would have no access to unfair dismissal laws. She claimed that small businesses in the ACT would find it hard to recruit to companies of less than 100 employees as workers would seek bigger companies for their job security.
Richard Dennis, deputy director of the left-liberal Australia Institute think-tank, said that the Howard government's claim that 77,000 new jobs could come from giving employers the right to sack people at will came from a "quick and dodgy" survey that has since been discredited by several Senate committees. He described people on the left, addressing the audience as such, as a pretty "hopeless" lot, in that they allegedly did not offer hope to people, but only pointed out the problems. He called on "the left" to steer the ALP's policy formulation process.
Pat Power, the Catholic bishop for Canberra and Goulburn, said Pope Leo in 1891 had issued an encyclical, Rerum Novarum, that supported the rights of workers and the right to strike, and said that the various Catholic social commissions in Australia "are in that stream". He said that exempting business from unfair dismissal legislation exempts employers from fair treatment of employees., and argued for a "fair balance between" employers and employees.
Robin Brown, president of the ACT Council of Social Services (ACTCOSS), said that "Australia" had "lost its way", and needing to get back to first principles of what a "fair society" is about. This required that there be equality of bargaining power in all markets, including the labour market.
Audience members questioned why the ACT union movement was not following the examples of the Pilbara and Victorian union movements in taking industrial action to oppose the new laws. Peter Malone, secretary of Unions ACT, answered that industrial action is about unions consulting with their members and they had yet to decide on this in the ACT.
From Green Left Weekly, July 6, 2005.
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