Paul Oboohov, Canberra
In a typical barnstorming media stunt, ALP federal leader Kim Beazley breezed into the tea room of the Action bus depot in Belconnen on March 29 and let rip, vowing to tear up the Coalition government's new industrial relations laws if he became prime minister and calling on the workers there to dump the Coalition parties at the next federal election.
However, the workers were in no mood to uncritically support the ALP or the union movement leadership. Bus driver Bill Nicholls said the ACTU had been sitting around singing songs and eating sausages instead of taking the fight to the government. The ACTU should be "picking up the telephone and getting on to Howard and saying 'bring it in and the nation is out for 48 hours'. That is what unionism is about", he said.
Bus driver Pat Ford said that Labor should have fought sooner to stop Howard's plans to radically change industrial relations. "Why is it that you have to come in now to see us; what happened five, six years ago?" he asked Beazley.
Beazley later told the media that Ford's point was unfair. "We've fought these industrial relations laws in all their various manifestations ... at every point where we have had an opportunity to do so and we're going to continue it." He added: "Those workers who voted Liberal last time now feel really fooled and they're really bitter about it and that is a good half of the Liberal Party's voters."
However, the bus drivers had already explained to Beazley why many workers abandoned the ALP at the last federal election. Ford said that alarm bells should be ringing for Labor after losing four successive federal elections. "The majority of people that you're getting your votes from are blue-collar workers ... They're the people you've got to get on side", he told Beazley. "You want to get votes, you want to be in as prime minister, you need to start looking after these sort of people."
From Green Left Weekly, April 5, 2006.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.