Western Australia needs a broad and inclusive mass movement to stop the Barnett government's push to privatise public services and smash public sector workers' conditions.
Premier Colin Barnett's neoliberalism, the ideology that has wrecked the world, raises important issues: in whose interests is WA governed? How do we mobilise the greatest number of people to defeat the government plans?
It also raises questions about the strategic direction that the state's main public sector union, the Civil Service Association (CSA), has taken in the campaign.
Life in WA has taken on a slightly surreal quality as the resource-driven export economy encourages developments in regional areas, pouring a river of profits into big corporations, while the government's budget brutally cuts services. WA produces approximately 40% of Australia's GDP. Hundreds of people move to the state every week looking for a better life.
Yet the state government is hell-bent on privatising and contracting out every service it can.
Public servants whose jobs are outsourced will have to follow their job to the new employer, even if this means a pay cut, with no option of redeployment or redundancy. If they refuse they face the sack. Meanwhile, those left in the public sector will be subject to an industrial relations regime worse than previous Coalition prime minister John Howard's Work Choices.
Anger is spreading. Nearly 3000 public servants rallied outside parliament on March 11, and the mood of the crowd showed that people are prepared to resist.
But so far, CSA leaders have been too focused on media lobbying exercises. It's been too little, too late.
Like other CSA members and delegates, I was shocked when our union leaders specifically told the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) to not bring its members to the rally.
The AMWU held a mass delegates meeting that morning, offering to bring a busload to the rally. But CSA leaders said they did not want the possibility of the TV cameras focusing on blue-collar workers, causing them to "lose control of the message".
The CSA's campaign strategy has been controlled at the highest level of the union. A December mass meeting of all government sector delegates was dominated entirely by the leadership. The only motions allowed came from hand-picked people and there was no discussion.
That too was designed as a media event with the "message" over-riding all else.
In 2009, as the government unrolled its plans, the CSA argued at a Unions WA council meeting that no rally be organised. The argument was that other unions were involved in other issues and the rally would fail.
The media blitz accompanying the March 11 rally included full-page newspaper ads — but they failed to mention the rally or call on the public to support it.
The official campaign has focused on marginal seats. But if we wait until the next election to defeat Barnett it will be too late — an incoming Labor government won't reverse Barnett's cuts.
Slick media messages won't sway Barnett, who only cares about his big-business mates. To block his onslaught, we need a massive community-wide campaign of resistance.
There needs to be a combined public sector unions campaign, in which Unions WA involves and educates the rest of the union movement and the whole community. Offers of solidarity should be welcomed, not turned away.
A basic lesson of the union movement is "united we stand, divided we fall". Don't public servants need to know they have the support of other workers?
WA's public servants are not traditionally a militant sector of the union movement, but the wind of solidarity in their sails will embolden them to greater struggle.
[Barry Healy is a CSA delegate and member of the Socialist Alliance.]