Ex-ACTU boss slams ‘union hubris, vanity’

Tim Lyons has criticised the union movement’s ‘nebulous’ Change the Rules campaign.

Former ACTU assistant secretary Tim Lyons. Picture: David Geraghty

Former senior ACTU official Tim Lyons has criticised the union movement’s “nebulous” Change the Rules campaign, declaring there had been millions of dollars spent by unions and “there’s abso­lutely nothing to show for it”.

Mr Lyons said the Adani issue was “very toxic” for Labor, and criticised the ALP, unions and GetUp for putting resources into “hubristic vanity projects” such as the seats of Kooyong and Higgins when they could have focused on Chisholm, which has been narrow­ly lost by Labor.

“I think it was a bit telling that watching the ABC on Saturday night that there was essentially no mention of the union campaign at all, either by anybody who won or anybody who lost,’’ he told The Australian.

“I just think it wasn’t a factor anywhere. So there’s a real question about spending that amount of money for essentially no quantifiable impact.

“I think, overall, the campaign was just a little bit nebulous.

“What does it actually mean? If you think back to Your Rights at Work, there was a very confident proposition, which was … the repealin­g of Work Choices, which is something people could get their heads around.

“I am just not sure anybody could really answer the question about what Change the Rules actuall­y meant. Now I think the idea was probably for people to read into it their pet issue, but I think the evidence is in now — it just didn’t ­actually work.’’

My Lyons said that “more broadly, we’ve probably reached the outer limits of that model of attemptin­g to ­mobilise around elections’’. “There was an awful lot of money spent and there’s abso­lutely nothing to show for it afterwards,’’ he said.

“I remain of the view that we’d be better off spending that money on organising workers and building something permanent. I think politics comes along with that when you organise ­people, but that model of voter contact and mobilisation around elections has probably run its course.”

Asked whether the election resul­t meant the Change the Rules campaign was dead on arrival, Mr Lyons, who quit as ACTU assistant secretary in 2015 after failing to topple then secretary Dave Oliver, said: “I would have thought so.”

He said the union movement needed to undertake a thorough and urgent review of the campaign — “to have spent that much money and essentially had no detectable impact can’t be something that’s acceptable going forward”.

GetUp should also be doing some “soul-searching” over its campaign as it, unions and Labor had engaged in a “bit of hubris­” over where they spent resources in the campaign. “Having very significa­nt resources in places like Kooyong and Higgins in the last week of the election, when we are going to lose Chisholm by 300 votes or something, looks pretty stupid in retrospect,’’ he said.

Mr Lyons said debate over the proposed Adani coalmine was “very toxic” for Labor in central and north Queensland but would not have been as bad “apart from that really self-indulgent, bloody vanity project of Bob Brown of driving around central Queensland in a Prius telling ­people that they should be ­unemployed”.

“I know that wasn’t his express message but that was clearly a message people heard.

“I think that was emblematic of what the Left side of politics did in the election, which was a whole series­ of vanity projects from GetUp resourcing Warringah, to Higgins and Koo­yong, to Adani.

“It was hubristic vanity projects. We probably got what we ­deserved in the end.”