grodscorp@grods.comWhy I was at the MCG this morning
 | Posted by Scott on Thursday 30 November 2006, 2:11 pm Categories: Politics Tags: Tags: ACTU, GregCombet, IndustrialRelations, JohnHoward, Labor, Liberal, MCG, TradeUnions, WorkChoices |
I’m not a member of a union. Hell, I don’t even have a job. But this morning I got up early, caught a train, walked along the Yarra with a takeaway coffee (so I could be easily identified as a member of the “latte left”), and took a seat at the MCG.
There is a widely-held belief in the community, summed up by MrLefty, that today’s anti-WorkChoices rallies around the country would achieve nothing. Being little more than expensive and high-profile union love-ins, the rally and march would change nobody’s opinion or vote and simply give John Howard more ammunition in the spin-laden promotion of his ideologically-driven industrial relations legislation. If this was true then I would agree that there was, as Lefty suggests, little point in attending the rally.
I held this view myself until a couple of weeks ago when I heard Greg Combet address a group of unionists. He told these blokey, Eureaka flag-toting building workers, in a stern and accusing tone, that ACTU research indicates a large proportion of union members around the country voted Liberal at the last election having been sucked in by John Howard’s bullshit interest rates scare campaign. Combet rightly made entire rows of the audience squirm by pointing out that those votes in all likelihood handed the balance of power, if not the election, to the Howard Government, and subsequently made possible the WorkChoices legislation. Hearing this I realised that the primary purpose of the ACTU Your Rights At Work campaign was not to convince the general public about the need to repeal WorkChoices by voting against the Liberals, but the membership of the country’s unions.
So this morning I toddled along to the MCG rally and afterwards marched to Federation Square. Sure, the overblown rhetoric of the union and Labor is just as reductionist and misleading as the Howard Government’s; sure, the lure of Jimmy Barnes was probably responsible for quite a few people showing up; sure, there were obscene quantities of meat pies and hot chips being consumed at 8 o’clock in the morning. But the fact remains that the WorkChoices legislation is intrinsically bad and the only way we’ll get rid of it is by voting against John Howard and the Liberal Party. If it takes a “rock concert” (as Howard called it) rally to change enough votes to make this happen then I’ll support it any way I can.
