There is something deliciously ironic in naming a bill “ensuring integrity”, knowing that it will create the most obscene mud bath of finagling and posturing in the Senate yet seen.
The first-order absurdity of the bill’s name — it is due to hit the upper house next week — barely needs commenting on. It is the usual deal: state power applied to the internal management of unions, while none of the same is extended to corporations.
The right will argue that corporations are subject to a “fit and proper persons” test. Yeah, right. Given what we know about what the banks, power companies, supermarkets and everyone else can get away with, the nature of the Ensuring Integrity Bill — which would use any malfeasance whatsoever by a union leader to penalise its entire membership — is clear.
It’s simply another iteration of anti-combination laws that have been pushed since the 19th century. The parties that trumpet the cause of “small government” can only keep capitalism spluttering along by using the state to regulate and micro-control the free association of workers.
Building on the neoliberal anti-strike, anti-worker platform they received, with gratitude, from the Gillard government, the Coalition is preparing for the possibility of a coming slowdown and the ensuing anger and militancy that might result.
Standard issue Coalition. Standard issue One Nation, too, with Pauline “Poujade” Hanson missing another opportunity to move deep into Labor territory, by cleaving to her small business base. The woman should get an OA for her services to destroying the right, from the inside. She gives Antifa a run for its money.
Centre Alliance? Its members should oppose, but they’re basically the old South Australian “Liberal Movement” about nine iterations down the road. One accepts however that “Mildly Centre-Right Blokes” would not have the same ring as Centre Alliance, so there we are.
Thus it comes down to Jacqui again. The last senator elected in the smallest state, her base the equivalent in number to the occupants of two cars going to a party in Sydney’s West, she now proposes to decide the immediate and long-term future of Australian unionism on the basis of the position of one leader of one state branch of one union, John Setka of the CFMMEU.
Setka has been convicted on one charge of abuse using “a carriage device” — i.e. a very shouty, insulty phone call to his wife Emma Walters — and nothing else. The conviction specifically excludes any notion of threats (which would have been a more serious crime). Setka was convicted of calling his wife — they are now reconciled — a “fucking Aussie dog”.
The other accusations against Setka — that he was (gasp!) possibly critical of Rosie Batty — should, even if they were relevant, be taken with a pallet of rock salt; disinformation as part of a torrid internal struggle in the CFMMEU, between the Lin Baoyi Group and the Red Wind faction. (Sorry, I misread my notes. Between a bunch of Croatians in Thomastown, and the Essendon Irish).
That Lambie has even factored all this into her now familiar public musing/butoh theatre performance of decision-making is disgraceful beyond disgraceful of course. You want to support a law saying no union leader should ever be convicted of anything?
Sure, though it’s an anti-worker, pro-corporate law. But to make it about one person, demanding their resignation, is star chamber stuff, against the spirit of disinterested and universal legislation applying to all citizens equally. It’s a corruption of what a Senate should be, something with the cheap air of banana republic junta politics about it.
It is also, of course, staggeringly hypocritical. Lambie was subject to years of bullying, rumours (of malingering) in her fight to gain compensation from the military, labelled as a rorter and a benefit cheat. Perhaps not best to pass laws and judgement on rumour and innuendo about a controversial figure?
If you’re going to hold the entire Australian union movement to ransom for rumoured malfeasance of one member, then it would seem that the Senate elite and their families get special treatment and consideration denied to the rest of us.
On a gender basis, the logic is cracked. The CFMMEU has presided over the entry into the building industry of women en masse, for the first time. They’ve just been fined $50,000 for action against a site that wouldn’t provide a women’s toilet. Focusing on Setka’s alleged malfeasance is simply to adopt the agenda and imperatives of bourgeois white professional feminism, uninterested in class issues, and objectively now on the political right.
Finally, if Lambie is purporting to represent the non-elites, and Tasmania, and especially northern Tasmania, then hobbling union power is a hell of a way to go about it. The target isn’t the SDA, a miserable company union that sells out its largely female workforce time and again; it’s a union that ensures that people with an average or spotty record in formal education can still get good, high-paying jobs.
Lambie represents a state, many of whose schools still only go to year 10 for godssake. Northern Tasmania depends on the maritime and fishing industry of Devonport and the coast. Voting up the bill in any form would be a betrayal of people who voted for Lambie to represent them.
Even considering it has been such a betrayal (God help us if it’s some cunning plan by the Australia Institute, which aspires to run Lambie). Do your job as a senator and make good laws based on the best interests of the people who need representing.
If not, what’s left of the CFMMEU will hopefully organise from Devonport outwards to turf you out next time. In the interests of ensuring integrity.
Guy, Tasmania is the small island off the south coast of Australia. Why don’t you go there, not fly over it, before you make your Ill informed commentary. The North West coast does not rely on fishing.
Your previous reportage was littered with inaccuracies including the misspelling of place names.
Your attacks on Lambie remind me of Alan Jones and Ardern or that beardy-weirdy on Sky and Greta thunberg
I said ‘depends on maritime and fishing’. Doesnt mean they are sole industries. But maritime is big, and you know it. Yr nitpicking over words to defend Lambie’s populism
Turtle, pull your head out of your shell and look around, if Lambie sign onto this union busting bill its the ordinary workers who will suffer, the coalition rednecks want the CMFEU boofhead to stay right where he is, he`s the best weapon they have to
the other unions its just that he`s too dumb to realise it, the reason Scummo wants the union movement destroyed is because they financially support his opposition the labor party, FFS australia wake up, its not rocket science or are you that dumb or blind you dont see what these conservative scum are and intending to do to your life style.
“But to make it about one person, demanding their resignation, is star chamber stuff, against the spirit of disinterested and universal legislation applying to all citizens equally.”
Umm … isn’t that what you have just done by making it all about Jacqui Lambie, ignoring the 35 coalition and 2 other Senators who will be voting the same way? Aren’t they each equally culpable?
try reading the first third of the article again
Guy Rundle is right to call out Lambie because she is the only one voting for the bill for the apparent reason that John Setka has not resigned from the NTEU. That puts Setka in the position of deciding whether he has to resign to protect the union movement, when anyone who acted on principle parliament would vote for or against the bill solely on what impact it will have on unions at large. So far as I am aware, Setka will still not be disqualified from holding office under this new anti-union bill, which encapsulates, as Guy says, in a watered down form the old anti-combination laws used against the nascent union movement in the nineteenth century , even if he repeats his bit of online abuse of his wife, who seems to have forgiven him for reasons best known to her. I think Guy is right too about the “Centre alliance”, although they have watered down the originally toxic form of the bill. Still, Julia gillard felt she had to replace work choices with he “Fair Work” bill, as though unions are not entitled to say that it is important for workers to negotiate collectively, since individually they have little or no bargaining strength.
Whoops. “John Setka has not resigned from the CFMMEU, Victorian Branch..
K
Yr wrong on 2 separate points:
1) we pretty much know the coalition are anti-union. Dont expect them yo be otherwise, or one nation. Centre Alliance, name’s on the tin. Lambie claims to be for the masses
2) a politician basing their general vote on an action one individual takes is an abuse of power. A journalist criticising the politician for doing so is the very opposite
Good to see you here in the comments defending your article Guy. First time I have seen it from any Crikey journo. You are not going to get much argument from me that Lambie should be making her decision on a piece of national interest legislation based on national interest grounds, not using the threat of an adverse vote on the bill to put collateral pressure on any individual to resign his or her employment. In other contexts, that might be called corrupt, or at least a breach of parliamentary privilege.
Aside from the actual content of the bill, what a naff name ie: ‘ensuring integrity’.
It’s sufficiently bad that the Americans may plagiarise it.
Good stuff from Rundle and good advice to Lambie, which she won’t take. The description of the multi cultural nature of the CMMFEU delightful. Left out the Turks, Lebanese and now apparently the Russians; at least in Sydney.
I don’t know for sure, but wouldn’t Setka be in his position as a result of an election? Why is Lambie hellbent on trying to overturn the results of a democratically held election? Witch hunt. SAD!
(The headline: “Lambie sells out her voters” is getting perilously close to “Dog Bites Man” – when does she not end up selling everyone out?)