E D I T O R I A L

With Prejudice
For anyone doubting the ability of an incumbent government to control the political agenda, this week's sitting of the Cole Royal Commission into the Building Industry made fascinating viewing.

F E A T U R E S

Interview: Class Action
NSW Teachers Federation general secretary Barry Johnson on Bob Carr's election budget and what he needs to do to win back the profession.

Safety: A Mother's Tale
Robin McGoldrick relives the tragedy that prompted her to confront Royal Commissioner Terence Cole over workplace story.

Unions: The Hottest Seat in Town
Nostalgia buffs should make a point of catching at least one session of Tony Abbott’s controversial, Royal Commission, playing to increasingly thin houses in Sydney. Jim Marr sat through the opening scenes.

International: Defensive Enterprise
How can men and women working in the unprotected "informal economy" be helped to better defend their rights? The ICTU grapples with the issue in The Congo.

Economics: A Super Deal?
Neale Towart looks at the debate raging within Labor circles around savings and investment.

History: A Radical Life
Stephen Holt gives an insight into one of the Australian Labor Party’s original true believers through his examination of papers held in the Manuscript Collection

Media: Cross Purposes
Stuart Mackenzie looks at the lines spun at the recent Senate committee hearing into media ownership laws.

Review: When the Force Is Unconscious
Cultural Theoritician Mark Morey reports on how a trip to the Sydney Writers Festival became a battle for intergalactic supremacy.

Poetry: Wouldn't It Be Loverly
For seven decades, Queensland aboriginal workers working under government control were 'paid' below-award wages which were placed into 'trust' accounts which were pilfered, levied, diverted and bled dry.

N E W S

Grieving Mum Turns Cole Around

Hamberger Grilled Over AWA Scam

Government Shrugs Off Death Sentence Charge

Action To Pay Foreign Crew Aussie Wages

Jockeys Face Insurance Crisis

Birds Get More Protection Than Workers

Budget Delivers - But Not For DOCS

Statewide Ban On Grain Loading

Howard Soft On Organised Crime?

UN Honours Building Union Drugs Program

Award-Winning Poet Wins Right To Write

Workers Out For Gay Games

Mahathir Told to Release Labour Activisits

Horta Backs Western Sahara Independence

Activists Notebook

C O L U M N S

The Soapbox
It’s The Members, Stupid.
Those officials obsessed with union voting power in the ALP are missing the point, writes Luke Foley.

The Locker Room
Too Good To Be True
Phil Doyle castes his withering gaze over a week in sport that featured origin square-ups, the World Game in all its glory and a few drunken jockeys.

Bosswatch
In The Cauldron
It was another week of pull-outs, profits de-mergers and takeovers in the corporate world; but some bright news with a plan to make executive pay more accountable.

Week in Review
The Black Letter
Legal mechanisms, national and international, are throwing up challenges to all sectors of our community but the law is a beast of many shapes and sizes as Jim Marr discovers.

L E T T E R S

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When Neville Wran announced that he was stepping down as Premier at the 1986 NSW ALP Conference, a handful of Party powerbrokers retreated to a small room under the stage of Sydney's Town Hall. They emerged some time later to tell the citizens of New South Wales who their new Premier would be. The State Labor Government never recovered.

16 years later the same small room was in use again. Last Sunday week a handful of union Secretaries from the ruling faction of the NSW ALP fronted Labor's Federal leader to warn him against any change to the rule that gives unions 60 per cent of the vote at the Party Conference. When it comes to NSW Labor, backroom politics still rules.

The current argument over union representation is a classic insiders debate. The formal ALP-union link is characterised by the dominance of entrenched hierarchies on both sides of the movement, dealing with each other to the almost total exclusion of their respective memberships.

Those union leaders who are giving Simon Crean a working over are just as likely as Labor MPs to be viewed in the eyes of the wider community - including their own members - as insiders in the political process.

Both ALP branch affairs and the Party-union link are characterised by a democratic deficit, at odds with the modern political demand for direct involvement and participation.

On this page last week, Labor Council Secretary John Robertson argued for changes to Party rules to give unions 50 per cent of the vote in preselecting ALP candidates. When Robertson writes of giving "unions" preselection votes, read union Secretaries rather than union members themselves.

What particular wisdom would a small group of almost exclusively male, middle aged union Secretaries bring to the process of choosing Labor's parliamentary candidates? Are these the people who should determine who is best equipped to take the fight to Larry Anthony on the far north coast, or to Jackie Kelly in Sydney's outer western suburbs?

Neville Wran's review of the New South Wales ALP found massive disillusionment among the Party's members. Across the state, one clear message came through: we're not listened to anymore. To further centralise decision making by moving to a system where Labor's local candidates are chosen in that small back room at the Sydney Town Hall, rather than locally, would be a step in exactly the wrong direction.

ALP membership and union affiliation will be given real meaning again only when the Party embraces one core principle: let individual ALP members and members of ALP affiliated unions talk for themselves.

Defenders of the ALP-union nexus argue that union affiliation gives the Party a formal link with close to 2 million working Australians. This is true. Let's go further, and actually give those unionists a say in the decisions of the Party that their union membership financially supports.

I have no problem with giving union members voting rights in Party preselections in the electorates they reside in. Under such a system, thousands of working people in every state and federal electorate would have a direct vote for who their ALP candidate is.

Aspiring Labor MPs would be forced to concentrate on communicating a message to a broad cross section of the community. Candidates would be far more likely than now to campaign on real issues affecting people. Issues based advocacy would become more important than the ability to cleverly manage ALP branch books.

The role for full time union officials would be very different to now. Rather than wielding block votes and factional power, union leaders would need to concentrate on organising their members to campaign on the issues affecting their lives, in order to have candidates respond to them.

This would be a healthy development for unions. The union renewal agenda concentrates on workplace leadership and member activism, and consciously seeks to devolve power. Yet for all the emphasis on organising and campaigning in the workplace, Australian unions' approach to politics hasn't changed at all.

The empowerment of union members in the affairs of Australia's only trade union based political party is long overdue.

Luke Foley is the Secretary of the Australian Services Union.

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