Rudd must beat unions: Labor guru

FORMER Labor Party strategist Rod Cameron says most Australians support a deregulated workplace and that Kevin Rudd must confront the trade unions over industrial relations. Mr Cameron, the head of polling company ANOP, said Labor had misjudged the public mood over John Howard's Work Choices laws, and Labor's policy made a "mockery" of the Opposition Leader's claim to represent the future.

"I think there is going to have to be blood spilt on the floor here," Mr Cameron said in an interview with The Weekend Australian. "I think that Kevin Rudd has to get into a fight with the trade union movement over industrial relations policy. And I don't mean a pretend fight but a real fight. Frankly, I don't think this is news to Rudd. "One of Kevin Rudd's main claims and believable strengths is that he is a cautious man of the future. But this is not credible if your policy is in lockstep with the trade unions."

Mr Cameron - Labor's longest-serving pollster and a pivotal figure in many election victories for the party - said trade unions were "very unpopular and they are not part of most people's lives". "You can't go back to the regulated workplace environment of a generation ago and most people don't want to return," he said. "The majority of voters are anti-union and they don't want the unions back in their lives. "While Work Choices has delivered some Howard battlers to Labor, the majority of such voters are ordinary people who work in a deregulated environment that involves casual and part-time work and they want a flexible workplace. "Labor's emerging industrial relations policy is totally contradictory to this. This policy makes a mockery of Kevin Rudd's claim to be a man of the future. A deregulated and flexible workplace is part of the modern world and Rudd cannot be a man of the future if he supports a workplace environment that takes us so far back to the past."

Mr Cameron's comments come as Mr Rudd prepares to fly to Western Australia this weekend for talks with the mining industry, a vocal critic of his industrial relations policies. Yesterday he held a private meeting with senior executives from mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton in Melbourne.

Earlier this week, Labor's special business adviser, Rod Eddington, also questioned Labor's handling of industrial relations. Sir Rod, the former chief of British Airways and a director of Rio, said the Opposition should have consulted more widely before releasing the policy.

Mr Cameron warned that Labor must accept Australian Workplace Agreements - the individual workplace contracts that Labor has promised to ban if it wins government. "Kevin Rudd has to salvage a way out on AWAs," he said. "Labor talks about transitional arrangements. But these arrangements need to be a transition to accepting AWAs." He expressed alarm at deputy Labor leader Julia Gillard's plan to give the industrial umpire power to impose settlements in disputes on grounds that harm was being done to the bargaining participants. He said this undercut Labor's support for enterprise bargaining and had "to be clarified".

Mr Cameron's remarks contradict Labor's orthodoxy of the past 18 months: that Work Choices is an election loser for the Prime Minister and Labor should work with the unions to shape an alternative policy. He warns Labor risks losing the election unless it re-thinks this approach. It is an unpalatable message that will infuriate much of the union movement and ALP. But Mr Cameron's credentials as a reader of the public mood and the pivotal role he played in so many Labor election victories should mean his comments have an impact. "I think Work Choices is exaggerated as a vote winner for Labor," he says. "John Howard went too far with Work Choices. I would judge it has helped Labor with a 1 per cent shift but not a 5 per cent shift.

"The majority of voters are unsympathetic to the unions. With a few notable exceptions such as (ACTU secretary and ALP candidate) Greg Combet, union spokespeople don't appeal to middle Australia. People tend to see union leaders as having a chip on the shoulder and being bitter whingers. They have had their heads in the sand for too long. The point is that there is a lot of anti-Howard and anti-government sentiment in the community on the basis that Howard is yesterday's man. But Rudd cannot possibly be credible on his claim as the man of the future with this industrial relations policy.

"A minority of people aren't happy with the changes in our workplaces but they are happening anyway, often without a lot of fanfare. The thought of Labor unscrambling this shift and returning to a more regulatory union system is anathema. The election I think is coming down to economic credibility. And industrial relations is part of the economic issue. The newspaper and business criticism of Labor's policy is unsettling and unhelpful but it is not necessarily a negative. The real point is what is happening with the electorate. This is not good news for Labor."

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Revolt against food faddism in Australian schools

MONTHS after state schools were ordered to dump junk food from their menus, most are still serving pizza, hot dogs, ice-cream and other processed foods. The Government introduced the "traffic light system" in its Smart Choices program to tackle childhood obesity on January 1, but half of schools have failed to get the balance right. Pizzas and hot dogs were labelled under the system as "amber" foods - to be served only occasionally - but Queensland Association of School Tuckshops spokeswoman Chris Ogden said schools were lagging. "A few have gone all 'green', but it is much easier to stick a tray of sausage rolls in the oven than make up salad rolls and wraps, that sort of thing," she said. "We can buy in pre-chopped lettuce and carrot but they come at a premium price."

Under the laws, foods are divided into "green" or healthy choices like salads, and "amber" or processed foods including low-fat pies, hot dogs and pizza. "Red" choices are limited to twice a term, which has made staging sausage sizzle fundraisers a nightmare at some schools.

A random survey of more than 100 primary school menus by The Courier-Mail showed very few indicated which choices were amber, green or red. Of the eight menus which were colour-coded, 45 per cent of the offerings were either amber or red. Eagleby South State School, in Logan, even offered daily "meal deals" such as a dagwood dog, juice and packet of chips for $2.70 and a pie, juice, Paddle Pop and packet of chips for $4.

Ms Ogden said although many schools tried hard, it was impossible to stop students from buying restricted foods outside the school grounds. "There's a fast food outlet near every school, whether it's a service station, a supermarket or a KFC or McDonald's," she said.

Responding to reports MacGregor State High School students had eaten 60 McDonald's burgers in one sitting, an Education Queensland spokesman said the students had not been on their lunch break and had had permission from their parents to leave the school.

Quality Food Services, which distributes food to about 800 school tuckshops, said pie sales had dropped under the Smart Choices guidelines because the new low-fat, low-salt varieties were relatively bland. Spokesman Glen Bound said tuckshops could not compete with local shops offering junk food. "It's a big problem at Runcorn State High, where the shop around the corner has changed its menu to suit the students. Their business has gone through the roof," he said. He had heard of students at other schools having pizzas delivered to the fence, and an enterprising student who took a backpack full of soft drink to school to sell to classmates.

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Australia's public broadcaster presents Leftist propaganda as history

Bastard Boys, the story of the 1998 waterfront dispute, screens on the ABC tomorrow and Monday. It's well made and should get a good audience in an election year where industrial relations is again an important issue. There has been extensive publicity about the series, and its makers have been keen to stress its impartiality. These claims are nonsense. The series is the most blatant union propaganda. It's a very strange use of public money by the ABC and the other government agencies involved: the Film Finance Corporation, the NSW Film and Television Office and Film Victoria.

Simple mathematics suggests the scale of bias. The miniseries is divided into four equal segments, each told from the viewpoint of one participant. Two are union officials (the then Maritime Union of Australia national secretary John Coombs and the ACTU's Greg Combet), one is a Labor lawyer, and one is Chris Corrigan, the head of Patrick Stevedores. The Corrigan segment contains far more from the union perspective than from his. So about 80 per cent of the story is told from the union point of view. Impartial?

What makes it worse is that a lot of time is devoted to the private lives of the union characters, with many scenes of them falling in love or reading to their children. So they emerge as warm, fully rounded people. All those images of Combet racing to pick up his daughter from child care will do him no harm with female voters in his new political career. In contrast, Corrigan is portrayed as a gawky and ridiculous loner without friends, or even associates. We often see him being driven around in the back of a dry-cleaning van (for security) but we never see him talking to his board of directors. The treatment of his family life is perfunctory. Almost the only time we see anyone on his side is when they're ratting on him. He is a man without context, implausible as both a human being and a successful entrepreneur.

In the opening minutes of the show, just after paramilitary figures with dogs rush onto the wharves, Combet introduces Corrigan as an "evil genius". Corrigan then explains what he was doing when the members of the Maritime Union of Australia were thrown off his docks. "I was asleep," he says. Indeed, he was dreaming "about this mad old Hungarian refugee I worked for as a kid. He employed a lot of local kids - well, we were cheap, of course - and he'd get us out in his market garden at 3am in the Mittagong winter freezing our balls off, cutting celery. He used to say, 'Work a little harder, bastard boys.' " Clearly, given the show's title, this is meant to compare Corrigan with the mad market gardener and the wharfies with the wretched Mittagong child labourers, with all the irony implied by such a comparison. But this is madness.

In 1998 the members of the Maritime Union of Australia were the aristocracy of the working class, earning in the top 5 per cent of all employees. They were also among the laziest waterfront workers in the world, with their all-important crane lift rate among the lowest in the OECD. The series doesn't go into this. It doesn't give us any sense of the years of failed efforts by Corrigan to make the wharfies see reason. We don't see the MUA, backed by the union movement and the Labor Party, assuring the public that crane lift rates could not be lifted from 18 to 25 an hour. (They reached that level two years after the dispute ended.) Without such context, this is poor drama and also poor history.

A voice missing from Bastard Boys is that of the many Australians affected for decades by the laziness and corruption on the wharves. We hear a lot in the series about the glorious traditions and history of the union. We hear nothing of its notorious record in undermining the war effort during World War II, all the looting, the go-slows and the strikes. We see unionists being kind to small children but hear nothing of how they held the country to ransom for decades. One example: a man I know well used to bring in containers during the 1970s. They took longer to clear the dock in Sydney than they did to travel from Germany by sea, until he started to bribe the wharfies.

For balance, Bastard Boys might have replaced one of its main union characters with one of the workers who briefly replaced the wharfies. These were often farmers driven off the land by economic reforms. Some sold their houses in the country and moved to the city to work on the wharves, then found themselves unemployed again when the courts ordered Patrick to reinstate the members of the MUA. These men and women, portrayed in the series as "scabs", suffered more than anyone else in this conflict.

Like the biopic Curtin, another piece of Labor hagiography recently screened by the ABC, Bastard Boys is bound to be used by schools to teach history for years to come. It continues the film and television industry's use of public money to remove the non-Labor view from Australian history. I believe the protestations of the makers of Bastard Boys that they did their best to achieve impartiality. The most interesting thing about the result is not that they failed but that they seem completely unaware that they failed.

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Australia's version of America's "pork"

EVERY Australian - all 20 million of us - are chipping in 5› each to raise $1 million to fight the great yellow crazy ant invasion of Christmas Island. We'll also give more than 12› each (around $2.5 million) for a national training centre for aerial skiing in southern Queensland. Australia's working men and women will contribute $800,000 to help the Geelong Art Gallery acquire the Eugene Von Guerard painting View of Geelong and we'll put up another $200,000 to assist any tourist from Denmark who gets sick during their stay.

Go through Tuesday night's Budget papers and you'll find a range of worthy but deeply strange ways your tax dollars get spent by a Federal Government which has to keep an eye on literally everything - including falling space junk. The Budget provides us with indemnity support of $2 billion above that required under the "UN Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused By Space Objects". Australians blown up by terrorist bombs also no longer have claims limited to $300 million, with liabilities now reaching $10 billion before anyone faces a reduced payout.

The Budget hands over $40,000 to the International Council of Christians and Jews biennial world conference, which kicks off in Sydney in July. It gives $200,000 to ensure tourists from Denmark can access Medicare if they get sick (with reciprocal rights). We give $400,000 to help transport the newly built "State Coach Britannia" to the Royal Mews in London and $2.5 million to the Aerial Skiing Training Centre in southeast Queensland. "The proposed centre will feature five jumps over a 30 metre by 25 metre pool and can also be utilised for water polo," Budget papers reveal.

Another fascinating use of taxpayers' dollars is in helping those of us on the dole who have a family member on death row in a foreign country. About $14,000 has been made available over two years to support "any income support recipient who remains overseas longer than the 13 weeks allowed under income support legislation in order to support a family member sentenced to death".

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