The advice Turnbull can’t afford to ignore
ACCORDING to those in the know, Bill Shorten is using US-based union training to treat Australia like a factory floor, writes Miranda Devine. Malcolm Turnbull needs to act now.
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BILL Shorten, a unionist who oozes insincerity, who either shouts his speeches or delivers them in a droning sing song, and who pronounces “with” as “wif”, is a most unlikely future prime minister.
But the gormless exterior hides a ruthless ambition trained to foment class war to gain power.
He has, after all orchestrated the political assassination of two Labor prime ministers, in order to catapult himself from the backbench to Opposition Leader in six bloody years.
If the opinion polls don’t change, he will have taken less than a decade to get to the Lodge.
How does he do it?
According to those in the know, he is using his US-based union training to treat Australia like a factory floor which needs to be unionised.
He is a graduate of the ACTU training program “Organising Works,” which is modelled on the American AFL-CIO’s Organizing Institute.
Over the past 23 years at least 300 new organisers have graduated from the program and infiltrated every union in Australia, with the aim of infiltrating every business in the country.
Another graduate of the program, industrial relations consultant Grace Collier, can see that Shorten is playing straight from Organising Works handbook.
“He sees Australia as a worksite that needs to be infiltrated and organised,” she says. “He is trying to control this country the way a union official tries to control a workplace.”
The number one tactic is to “create a perception of chaos” on the floor, so that the workers think the bosses are idiots who don’t know what they’re doing, she says.
“You say these people are hopeless, they can’t run the joint. People want order, and you put yourself forward as the person to bring order.”
She says the core task of a union organiser is to “win the trust of workers” by exploiting any differences between staff and management. The organiser then “compiles a list of grievances and engages in a public fight to correct them in order to drive a wedge between workers and bosses. And finally “the union puts itself up as alternative leader”.
Collier says the media has been “organised to do Labor’s work” using such wily Labor operatives as Paul Howes and Graham Richardson.
Meanwhile, the Turnbull government is behaving like the bosses on the factory floor locked in their office looking at spreadsheets, certain that they are doing such a good job the workers eventually will recognise their efforts.
If Collier were advising the PM, she would give him the advice she gives company bosses trying to break union control of their workplace.
“You get out of the office and you talk to the workers, every day. You tell them what you’re doing. You don’t send out a memo and expect people to see you’re doing a good job. And you never talk to the unions.”