Unions call out Labor over Adani

On Adani this week, Labor’s perennial problem was totally exposed. Who does it actually stand for?

The union movement, as the founder and natural owner of the Australian Labor Party, brings various strengths and weaknesses to the relationship. One of the great gifts unions bestow on their subsidiary political outfit though, aside from money and people, is the frank perspective of ordinary folk. Union officials don’t care what anyone thinks of them, and so they can be sometimes quite good at cutting through and channelling the straight talk of ordinary people.

So it was this week that the ex-boss of a “right-wing” union excoriated the pesky underlings running Queensland Labor for their undergraduate, contrary and inexplicable position on the $16.5 billion Adani coalmine project.

“There’s thousands and thousands of Indians over there still with bloody oil lamps that want bloody coal,’’ Bill Ludwig, the former national president of the Australian Workers Union, declared. “You’ve got protesters talking about the black-throated finch … I mean, this is so ridiculous, you just can’t understand where they’re coming from …”

The Queensland government, under the influence of a “few lefties”, Ludwig said, had given “do-gooders” (anti-Adani activists) “every opportunity’’ to prevent the mine from going ahead, including a last-minute decision to commission a report on dangers posed to a species of bird. The report has just been handed in, and has recommended an immediate shutdown of the mine if the flock numbers decline over five years.

Ludwig is right to give Labor a blast. What point is there in opening a mine and employing thousands of people if it will be automatically shut down if bird numbers drop? Imagine what the employer might write on the thousands of employment severance certificates — “terminated, no prospect of future work, mine closed — not enough black-throated finches”.

Here is where Labor has a perennial problem bubbling away, and this week it rose up. Who does Labor stand for: working people in the mining sector, like the people who want to work at Adani, or the publicly funded activists, those who have the time to agitate against the project? There are people who work for a living, and then there are activists, and Labor needs to work out who it should back.

There has been for some time significant tension between Labor and the various unions involved in mining. Now another furore has opened up with a different union, this time in the meat sector.

Labor has previously committed to shut the live sheep export sector down within several years because of animal welfare concerns. However, on February 7, at a Rural Press Club gathering in Queensland, federal opposition rural spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon said Labor was “unequivocally” committed to the ongoing live export of beef. The Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union reacted with white hot fury.

The federal secretary of the union fired off a blistering missive. A letter to Fitzgibbon, signed by Graham Smith, begins: “We write to express our outrage at comments recently made by you”, and goes on to say: “It completely bewilders us that the Labor Party cannot grasp the fundamental principle that sending a raw material overseas for processing instead of processing it here in Australia and value adding, provides far fewer jobs.”

The letter talks of Labor’s “flawed economic rationale” and accuses the party of completely ignoring the importance of the meat processing sector, which in many regional areas generates “almost single-handedly the entire backbone of community growth”.

Meatworkers, Smith points out, have incomes that are interrupted by seasonal fluctuations, droughts and cattle shortages. “On top of all these matters they are then told by the ALP that one of the factors that could assist them is not even under consideration by the party.”

The union, Smith writes, is not “the extreme Left”. “We are the ones bringing rational debate to the party to protect Australian jobs, grow regional communities, grow the Australian economy, and grow international trade” and we “will not be ‘stared down’ as we continue to demand further debate within the party”.

The letter ends, “Your comments that cement the ALP to an absolute position on live beef exports not only inflame and anger our members, they also steel our determination to see that position reversed and we will redouble our efforts in this direction.”

Just because Labor is owned by the unions doesn’t mean it has a monopoly on the representation of working people or a failsafe understanding of their concerns.

Whether the issue relates to Adani, the meat sector, tax or retirement incomes, there are plenty of policy touchpoints where Labor intends to smash the financial interests of ordinary people.

When even some of the unions are waking up to this, then so surely will the rest of the community.