It’s quite an ask of the Australian people to demand we be terrified of a woman in a chiffon orange blouse who can’t even bring herself to call her enemies “dinosaurs” while she argues “love is love” on the television. But the Turnbull government is so desperate for villains to distract the Australian people from its ongoing policy failures, internal ructions and dwindling popularity that the former nurse, grandmother and blouse-wearer Ged Kearney – appearing on this week’s Q&A in her role as the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions – will have to do.
Attacking unions is a recurring trope of conservative politics, but any Australians who thought it would perhaps have been exhausted in this governmental cycle by Tony Abbott’s tilt at a TURC were forewarned more was to come on the night of Turnbull’s re-election. His infamous speech railed against the “mass ranks of the trade union movement” and twice denounced the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union. This tactic of demonising unions has been in heavy use by the government this week, making Kearney’s visibly non-demonic appearance on Q&A a contradiction of some inconvenience.
A failure of the invoked old shadows to inspire much fear is ongoing propaganda problem for the government in the new era of social media engagement and greater news transparency. Coalition union-bashing actually began as early as August, when Peter Dutton tried to somehow blame the CFMEU for construction companies breaking the law by importing lethal and illegal asbestos products. This very publication revealed - and all too soon - it was, in fact, a CFMEU delegate on a Multiplex site who had discovered asbestos material and alerted authorities to its use.
On Tuesday, it was the prime minister himself reaching for the bash-o-meter, declaring “union thuggery” was somehow the reason for Sydney and Melbourne’s unaffordable house prices.
This time, Michael Pascoe from Fairfax helpfully pointed out on Twitter that the majority of housing construction is non-union, and at least someone should have reminded the prime minister that it’s the over-supply of new builds currently under construction – undeterred, it seems, by labour costs – that’s our best chance of driving down property prices if they can sufficiently glut the market.
oh dear. Except for big unit blocks, housing construction pretty much non-union. But don't let facts get in the way of a desperate PM https://t.co/CKZQyQk28W
— Michael Pascoe (@MichaelPascoe01) October 18, 2016
But why let facts spoil a fantasy of political convenience? Especially when the factors helping to inflate house prices – like negative gearing, capital gains tax discounts and foreign property speculation – are all things that the government could use its power to address, but doesn’t really wanna.
Perhaps to make the stretches of Turnbull’s s accusations more credible in comparison, Dutton was wheeled out again yesterday. Responding to a Dorothy Dixer on “dangerous non-citizens”, he delivered an anti-union rant so bizarre it could be described radical performance art. For those who just can’t bring themselves to watch the video, Dutton claims “young Australians” trying to buy property know apartments are “more expensive because they have seen building costs increase as a result the involvement of the unions and the bikies”.
Bikies? What next? Vampires? The pretext for the condemnations is the union-busting ABCC legislation but one wonders if the bill itself isn’t an excuse to devote parliamentary hours to smear Bill Shorten, publicly known to be an ex-union official, through these... tenuous associations.
Brisbane’s Courier-Mail reported:
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was joined by Treasurer Scott Morrison, Mr Dutton, Mr Ciobo, an extremely strident Greg Hunt and the Minister for Small Business Michael McCormack to mention the CFMEU 29 times during Question Time.
Which returns us to the problem of Kearney – among others – whose visible public status as as one of the country’s most powerful union officials is in laughable juxtaposition to “union thuggery” imagery the government is pushing.
Her contribution to Q&A is a case in point: her statements such as “I think big business needs to be held accountable”, “make sure those labour hire firms are actually licensed”, “heinous crimes are when somebody dies on site because safety hasn’t been attended to” and “it is appalling that the possibility that someone like Donald Trump with those hideous sexist views of his could possibly be President” are not the claims of a nefarious outsider. They’re values common to the overwhelming majority of Australian people.
It’s a contrast between fiction and reality that has not passed unnoticed to a broader audience. Witness Father Bob praising the CFMEU’s generosity towards charities, or the Huffington Post praising the AMWU’s adorable Twitter account, an energetic community boycott of CUB products and comedian Dave Hughes working in childcare for a day to support an ongoing United Voice campaign for better pay. None of this works in the Coalition’s favour. The public result of this week’s shenanigans was only the hashtag #blameunions – mocking the government and trending for hours.
Failing to appreciate the new reality, assistance from old allies like Bill Leak assist only in making the anti-union claims look out of touch. Leak’s cartoon this week depicting a fat, white male rail worker asking his female partner to hit him over the head with a champagne bottle so he could access paid domestic violence leave predictably drew the ire of Rail, Tram and Bus Union – who are pressing for such leave and at whom it was targeted. It particularly irked Victorian secretary, Luba Grigorivich, who in person and in deed hardly conforms to Leak’s insistent stereotypes.
“People who think it’s OK to make jokes about domestic violence are drinking from the same ... well as those who think it’s OK to brag about grabbing women ‘by the pussy’,” she has said.
One can’t help but conclude that the statements of Kearney and Grigorivich are far more representative of majority values in this country, than silly cartoons of “union thugs” - wherever they are offered - would prefer that we believe.
Van Badham is vice-president of the MEAA in Victoria.
