The tertiary education union is run by political children. At least the CFMEU is sticking it to the man.
Billy Bragg sings that there is power in a union. There is a lot of nonsense now too. But that doesn’t scan as well. I was subjected to Bragg at an impressionable age. I saw him perform live in the mecca of liberal America: Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I still like the song; the left has all the best ones. They are inversely proportionate to the systems they inspire. They promise liberation and deliver the opposite. Right-wing protest songs are a contradiction in terms. Learning of their apparently conservative persuasion, I’ve started to listen to Kate Bush and David Bowie differently.
The Rolling Stones are Tories but do they best the leftie Beatles? Elvis leaned GOP (and famously met Richard Nixon), but a little of him goes a long way. Ditto Meatloaf – though his Paradise by the Dashboard Light is a wonderful repudiation of how the modern left polices sex. After that the choices are limited – unless you have the stomach for country music.
The greatest conservative-religious country song is This Train. Watch the 1977 Johnny Cash version, sung in a quartet with Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Carl Perkins (on YouTube). My wife will divorce me if I play it again. But outside the American South, conservative popular music doesn’t exist. Try searching for that playlist on the relentlessly progressive Apple Music app.
Only free market capitalism can generate protest songs against it and guarantee huge profits for their writers, such as Bragg. Good luck to him. But what happened to the unions he eulogised four decades ago? In Australia, the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, and Energy Union has gone full William Wallace, and the National Tertiary Education Union has gone full woke.
The violent subtext of nearly everything John Setka says, and now has tattooed around his neck, at least comports with a tradition of working-class solidarity as physical resistance. He would have stood at the Eureka Stockade.
The NTEU, in contrast, has been hijacked by political children. When it takes a stand, it is against, first, the solitary democracy in the Middle East (and the only state in that region that protects LGBTQI+ freedoms) and, second, against the right of university women to debate prevailing gender orthodoxy. Can a trade union movement, representing a sliver of the tertiary sector, be built on such foundations?
Its anti-Zionism has become a secular faith. The NTEU was complicit in enabling Hamas sympathisers to occupy our campuses this year. Stuffed under my office door last week was a breathless call to cut ties with the world’s only Jewish state.
There are 57 Muslim nations. None have significant Jewish populations. Many have in their history treatment of Muslims much worse than Israel will ever approximate. Civil wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, in the Sahel region of Africa: “Nothing to see here,” says the NTEU activist. The plight of the Muslim Uighurs in China? “Move along, comrade.”
And on gender? This month, Queer Unionists in Tertiary Education (a network within the NTEU) tried to stop a lesbian philosopher from speaking to philosophers, about philosophy, at the University of Sydney. Holly Lawford-Smith, according to Nick Riemer, president of the university’s NTEU branch, was an “anti-trans bigot” who should have been deplatformed. Who made him the arbiter of campus morality?
What happened to more pay for less work? Where is the NTEU equivalent of Setka’s (admittedly self-proclaimed) hardline negotiating savvy? Instead, as a professor, I’m implored to silence feminist women and Jews.
The CFMEU is at least sticking it to the man. The Prime Minister is having conniptions trying to bring it into line. The NTEU? It has ingratiated itself with every left-wing Green/Labor cause, to the detriment of university pay and conditions – and academic freedom. It was right to hold universities to account for wage theft. Conflating that with some social justice omni-cause weakens its power to do so again.
University bosses are laughing all the way to the bank. “You want gender transition leave? Sure, please go ahead and take some. We’ll fund it. Just don’t ask us, with international student caps looming, for more salary.” “Fine,” says the NTEU. “Our priority is a TERF- and Israel-free campus. More pay can wait.”
Once a man of the working-class left, Bragg has joined the anti-JK Rowling wing. To the tune of the US civil war song Battle Cry of Freedom: The NTEU forever defending trans rights / Down with the transphobes, the wokers unite / With our brothers and our sisters and the proud non-binary / There is less power but more virtue signalling in this union
Bragg’s other great song is Between the Wars – a powerful tribute to a British working class about to sacrifice its young men in World War II. The new version? How about: I was a lecturer, I was a doctor / I was a D&I trainer, between the culture wars / I redefined the family, made it subject to diversity / Glamping at the anti-Israel protest, between the culture wars …
These new versions won’t go platinum, I suspect. And there’s the rub. Trade unions, such as the CMFEU and NTEU, have abandoned all pretence to common sense and thus to an effective political populism. They speak to a dwindling minority of zealots – except the original Zealots were Jewish, so the NTEU would have to deplatform itself.
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