ACTU spends millions on ads attacking wages, unemployment

The union body will spend millions in the next three weeks on its biggest ever national ad blitz.

The ACTU will spend millions of dollars in the next three weeks on its biggest ever national advertising campaign as unions seek to make low wages growth and insecure work a key vote-changing issue at the May 18 election.

Unions spent more than $10 million on the Your Rights at Work campaign to defeat John Howard in 2007 and ACTU secretary Sally McManus said today the new advertising blitz across television, radio, print and digital media would be the “biggest advertising campaign we have ever run — period”.

The 12 “This is not Australia” advertisements feature workers who responded to a casting call to be extras in an advertisement.

The ACTU said “some were primarily actors, some were not” but the comments they made were unscripted and related to other work they did. One of the women, Leonie, has worked on television as an actor but her comments related to her work with Uber.

'Alanah' from Queensland spoke about her experiences finding work.

Ms McManus said hundreds of workers responded to the casting call

“Some people who came had never acted before,’’ Ms McManus said. “Some people who came had been extras before. They look out for ads like that. All of them had multiple jobs. None of them are professional full-time actors. The part of the ad that actually plays isn’t when they are acting. It’s just having a chat about what their life is like.

“They didn’t know at that particular period of time that was going to be the ad. They did of course know after we decided we wanted to put it to air. Obviously there was discussions with them”

Workers talk about the struggle of insecure work and cost of living pressures.

She said the people featured in the ads ranged in age from 20 to 60 and came from a cross section of society. “Some were juggling up to five jobs. They were tradies, transport workers, mining workers, bar managers, swim teachers,’’ she said.

The ads feature the workers talking about the struggle of insecure work and cost of living pressures. A voiceover says “This is not Australia,” and urges a change of government.

“This campaign shows the truth of working life for far too many Australians,’’ Ms McManus said.

“This is a truth Scott Morrison does not appear to care about. Under his Government, people don’t have jobs they can count on to live and plan good lives. This is not the kind of country we want to be, nor is it the Australia of the fair go”.

“The campaign shows that we have a choice about the future for working people in Australia. We can continue down the low-pay, insecure American path, or we can change the Government and change the rules to win a fair go for working people.

“Scott Morrison denies we have a problem with too many insecure jobs so he has no plan to fix it. He also has no plan to fix record low wage growth. Yet these issues are dominating the lives of most working people and their families.”