Australian Workers' Union

I'm Erin Watson, and this week my co-host Neil Farrow is off on medical leave.

So instead, I'll be joined by someone who I am calling the consensus candidate, as they were suggested both by Neil, his fellow Labor and AWU comrade, and someone in Angus Taylor's office, obviously the leader of the Federal Liberal Party opposition leader.

Welcome to Misha Zelinsky.

Good to be with you.

So maybe you could just give the listeners a bit of your background and where you sit in the machine.

Very, very briefly.

For many years, I was the AWU Assistant National Secretary.

So the AWU's major union in Australia invented the Labor Party in the 19th century.

Yeah, so much of this story seems dominated by big personalities, John Setka, Mick Gatto, and there are others, many from the underworld, who seem to be involved in this story.

Just staying with the unions for a bit, though, is this kind of a left-right story as it always has been in the union movement? There's a big union representing construction workers called the AWU, the Australian Workers Union.

They often seem to be regarded as right-wingers, whereas the CFMEU were left-wingers.

Is that a useful way to look at it, Nick? Sorry, ignore Ben.

Well, the elements of the AWU have been most famously associated with Bill Shorten, who was on the right of the Labor Party, so the right faction, both, of course, the AWU and the CFMEU.

were Labor Party aligned, the CFMEU has been suspended as a result of this scandal.

The real division, though, between the Australian Workers' Union and the CFMEU came about who would cover the workers on these large government infrastructure jobs around the country.

Now, in law, and it's complicated, but under industrial law, demarcation laws, it was the AWU.

future conference.

The focus of my talk tonight will be the rank and file dispute that erupted in 1964 between 2,500 members of the AWU and workers at the Mount Isa mines against their bosses, the state and federal governments, and even their own union leaders.

Despite workers eventually returning to work on the company's terms, for six long months The Mount Isa dispute captured the imaginations of workers across the country and stands as a testament to workers' self-activity and organisation.

So Mount Isa is the nearest port in Townsville and it is miles away from anywhere.

Now the state government was perfectly happy to provide only the barest essential services to the town.

But when it came to settling disputes, it was prepared to mobilise their full force against workers and picketers.

Another key force of shaping or impairing workers' struggle in the town was a union that covered the mining workers, the Australian Workers' Union, or AWU.

The AWU was from its very inception a bureaucratic and conservative monstrosity, wedded firmly to the policy of arbitration and hostile to any form of rank and file organising.

This is a kind of Labor Party classic.

This is the... sort of founder of the Amalgamated Miners Association, founder of the AWU, a sort of leading contributor to the formation of the Labor Party, writing about 10 years into the federal story.

And he says, you know, this is the Labor perspective on Australia's past and Australia's future.

And there was a tendency among historians and political scientists, I think, to scoff at the egocentric kind of story he was telling.

It became so widespread, DECA had to remove 54% of the fleet from service leading to the 25-26 fire season and the department continued to find cracking in G-Wagon and Unimog fire trucks after that.

So what does a report like this mean to particularly those firefighters in Forest Fire Management of Victoria? Ross Kenner is with the Australian Workers Union, the AWU, their Victorian president and lead organiser.

for country victoria welcome to the program when you see this report land and so many concerns are about firefighting on public land like i just read

what stands out to you oh look we're not really surprised uh the awu has been fairly vocal in this area for a long period of time uh trying to get the department to address some serious health and safety concerns we have for our membership so it's good to see that that position has been vindicated by the auditor general

There's been a massive remediation project, which a lot of our members have been heavily involved in.

So we are hopeful that the issues have been resolved to the best of the ability.

Look, the AWU raised concerns about the purchase of the G wagons when it happened.

We've also been on record repeatedly over the time they've had the G-Wagon fleet in that there was issues there.

right.

Yeah, and then you had that other, there was another bloke up there, an organizer of the AWU, and he's obviously sitting giving all these testimonies that no one can corroborate other than himself.

He felt threatened, they said this, they said stuff.

Not that I would condone any of that if it was true, you know what I mean? 100%, you shouldn't have done it.

But just going up there and saying that, and this is a bloke who works for the AWU, who basically told BMD to engage bad people to come on the job and threaten CFMEU members.

so when you're looking at the form on these people that that's come out in the commission yeah why are these people not being held account they're actually it sounds like they're doing what they're accusing us of doing exactly all we want is our members to be paid well for what their for their hard work get their conditions and go home the way they rocked up

And the safety on that job was horrendous.