By Scott MacWilliam
A joke doing the rounds in WA sums up the state of work at the old Swan Brewery. Question: "When is a picket line not a picket line?" Answer: "When [state heritage minister] Jim McGinty tells [BLF secretary] Kevin Reynolds it is only a protest".
The most obvious point is that BLF officials have used McGinty's endorsement to support their claim that it is not a picket line. They and a hand-picked small group of Multiplex workers have been crossing each day with a police escort to work at the site.
The claim has been necessary to deal with discontent simmering among rank-and-file BLF members. The ease with which the union's leaders have abandoned a previous principled position — not to work on the site when police are used against protesters — has deeply disturbed long-time militants in the union.
These members recall that secretary Reynolds once said: "We will not work while police are present on site". Now the militants are condemned in the latest issue of the union's journal, while the workers who are escorted on to the job by police get praise from grateful officials. Notes Reynolds in an editorial: "The Multiplex workers who are on the site have come under considerable threats and abuse not only from the protesters, but also from fellow BLs".
The second object of the joke is minister McGinty, who has been at pains to downplay both the continuing protest and his role in bringing police to the site each day to clear access. Like the daily newspaper, the West Australian, the minister tries to convince the electorate that the battle is over.
The trouble for the minister's reputation is that police continue to arrest people for all manner of offences. Swearing at workers, who abuse the pickets in similar terms with impunity, is one of the more trivial charges used to harass protesters. At a time when eastern states police have expressed concern that they are being used to break picket lines, their WA counterparts follow a demonstrator from a protest meeting and arrest the person for loitering while waiting for a bus.
Unfortunately for the minister and the government, the use of police to achieve development goals has made the forthcoming state election even more volatile. The brewery protest and another at Hepburn Heights, in Perth's northern suburbs, have in the last week taken a turn which the government might well regret come election time.
Plans are being drawn up to target marginal seats, federal and state, including Fremantle (McGinty and federal treasurer John Dawkins), Swan (education minister Kim Beazley) and Morley, where former TLC secretary Clive Brown is trying to enter state parliament. Whether anti-government candidates will run in these seats or there will messages in stickers and posters, the ALP currently holds too many seats in WA by small margins to be comfortable with protests which will continue until next year's elections.
Of more immediate concern for the government, because of its even greater potential to have devastating electoral repercussions, is the rumour circulating in Perth that Multiplex already has on-sold the brewery project.
Multiplex is principally a labour hire firm, and can be expected to sell the building at the earliest convenient moment. Especially if the buyer is an Asian firm, similar to that which has gained control of the Burswood Casino, a storm of criticism will erupt. While there can be little satisfaction in the fact that some of this will be as racist as that which has been levelled at Aboriginal claims for sacred sites, the fear of such a storm makes the news of the purchaser no less potent as a weapon.
Knowing how devastating such news could be for the government's re-election prospects puts Multiplex in an enormously powerful position, able to demand almost anything in return for holding up an announcement until after the poll is held. Working against the sale remaining a secret is the fact that Perth is still a rather small city, in which today's confidential meeting is tomorrow's common gossip.
However, Western Australians don't expect to find out what is going on from the local media. After all, for most of the 1980s the state's press, radio and television managed to keep the details of the WA Inc deals from the local population until it was finally impossible to suppress the information any longer.