A montage of mates joined at hip pocket

EFFORTS by NSW trade union supremo John Robertson to gloss over the grossly offensive and sometimes outright criminal behaviour of union leaders are as ridiculous as the act of putting lipstick on the fabled pig.

That the Unions NSW secretary feels it necessary to attempt to spin away the thuggish reality is indicative of the strength of the symbiotic relationship between the union movement and the Labor Party.

While Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd may tut-tut at gutter language of union thugs such as the ETU's Dean Mighell (while overlooking more obvious aggressive behaviour), both he and Robertson know neither body can exist without the other.

More to the point, Rudd is willing to ignore the hard fact the ETU will still fund ALP campaigns in Victoria and has also thrown $50,000 to Senator Bob Brown's Greens, who have agreed to a preference-sharing deal brokered by NSW senate hopeful Mark Arbib. So much for Rudd's principled stand.

But while some Labor candidates won't mention their party affiliation on their how-to-vote cards, it is no secret the ALP was the creation of the trade union movement and the trade union movement bankrolls it to this day. They aren't just joined at the hip, they have a joint chequing account and they are lip-locked.

In fact, the kissing-cousin fashion with which deputy Labor leader Julia Gillard smooched Mighell at the conference where he made his threatening and foul-mouthed attack on employers says it all.

Robertson says union leaders are not really beer-gutted figures such as WA heavies Kevin Reynolds (friend of disgraced WA premier Brian Burke, Rudd's ally) or his thuggish mate Joe McDonald. No, he says, union officials today don't use their brawn, they use their brains.

Perhaps he is thinking of those like Greg Combet, who cut his teeth in the historically treacherous WWF and had a hand in its merger with the bludgers of the pre-reform MUA.

Robertson's clumsy makeover is in line with the campaign created by ALP spin doctors Hawker Britten to present the Opposition Leader as St Kevin of Queensland and overlook the damage he wreaked when he was that state's leading public servant.

The ABC pushed the same public relations line with its whitewash of Combet, now an ALP candidate, through its prime-time screening of the farcical Bastard Boys fiction.

The fact, however, is that no one but Combet had a hand in the script when he told the ALP's media arm last year: "They reckon we (the unions) used to run the country a while back – I reckon it wouldn't be bad if we did."

No matter how many fictional programs about the wharfies the taxpayer-funded broadcaster, the nation's largest media organisation, puts to air, it can't escape the fact that the waterfront has historically been run by corrupt trade unions.

And no matter how many scriptwriters declare their love for the hard men of the waterside gangs, there still remain veterans like Evan Jones, formerly of the 2/3rd, to remind us that the wharfies stole everything they could lay their hands on when he and his mates returned from the Middle East via Melbourne en route to continue fighting the Japanese at Kokoda during World War II.

"They only stopped when we grabbed a half dozen of the sods and smothered them in rancid butter," he recalls. "When they declared our ship black we finished unloading it ourselves. Then the railway workers said they wouldn't let us entrain and one of our blokes from Moree said he would drive the engine, so they declared it unblack."

Now, that's a movie the ABC should make and it wouldn't have to call it fiction.

And of course there is Australian Council of Trade Unions president Sharan Burrow, who has been busily lobbying the International Labour Organisation for six months to include Australia on a list of the world's worst labour regimes – ahead of truly despotic nations, such as Colombia, in which union organisers are routinely murdered.

She will no doubt be seeking support from such nations as Libya, Saudi Arabia and China, renowned for their respect of democracy and liberty, as she seeks to blackguard Australia in the eyes of the world. Nice one, Shazza.

But the reality is that Burrow, one of the most senior members of the trade union movement, is not out there representing the dwindling trade union membership, she is out there as a footsoldier for the ALP attempting to undermine the sterling reputation of the nation in a bid to smear the Howard Government.

This is just another stunt by those in the union movement anxious to ensure the parliamentary Labor Party (53 per cent of whom have trade union backgrounds) win office.

The union movement's next meal ticket lies imbedded in Labor's industrial relations policy which Rudd himself introduced at the ALP national conference. It is designed to re-establish collective bargaining within the workplace, even if a majority of those employed are not trade union members and do not wish to be part of a collective agreement.

It is designed to apply the screws to non-union workers and make them pay a fee to unions for negotiations to which they may not be a party. And the cash goes back to the ALP in large lumps with more than $50 million flowing in from the unions since 1996, and their pledge to raise more than $28.5 million for this year's elec- tion fight.

Robertson notoriously flogged Currawong, the old workers' retreat, in a deal which Health Minister Tony Abbot said he would refer to police.

He claims the union movement needed the money to fight Prime Minister John Howard's work reforms but it is no secret that he is also attempting to find a safe Labor seat so he can join his erstwhile comrades in Parliament, the lifeboat the ALP reserves for its closest union mates.