Paul Howes' Opening Speech to the 2009 AWU National Conference
2 February 2009
AWU National Secretary Paul Howes' Opening Speech to the 2009 AWU National Conference.
Delegates, today is a proud day for me. I am proud to deliver my first address to you as your National Secretary.I am proud and humbled that I and the National Leadership team were re-elected unopposed last week for another four years.
For this I thank you all.But most importantly I am proud to stand before you all and say that we the members, delegates and officers of this union are more determined than ever before to go forth and fulfil our mission to build the power of the working men and women of Australia.
To watch that opening video is to relive a lot of dreadful memories.
Of big dogs on chains and big men in black balaclavas.
Of the threat of having to work on Christmas Day.
Of the threat of being sacked at an hour's notice with no compensation.
Of the curdled vegemite voice of John Howard telling big fibs every day.
And the infantile comments of Alexander Downer,and the hyena smirk of Peter Costello.
It's a remote dark age that's amazingly only four hundred days in the past and yet we're in a new world now.
With a new American President who showed us in a few days how fast a world can change.
He said in his Inaugural Speech, just a few days ago, how he understands the needs of working people, and he understands the pride they have in what they produce, and can produce unceasingly into the future.
He said time and time again he wants America to make things and not just shovel banknotes into the furnace of global trickery.
He wants America to build good union jobs. He believes, as much as any of us, in what we here in Australia would call a fair go.
So the question is how do we here in Australia, here in our great union, build a new partnership for hope, for change and local opportunities - - as we feel the wave of hope from America make its way across the Pacific to wash over our shores?
Do we in the Australian Workers Union fit into this brave new world? Do we have a role? To find the answer we need to look to our proud past .
And we find that Yes we fit; Yes we have a role. Because it has always been our mission to act as more than a just a trade union.
To advance Australia is not a new notion to us. From our very first days we knew - unlike many others in the labour movement - we knew that to ensure justice and equality for our members we needed to not only change the conditions of employment, but we needed to change the way of life for working people on this continent.
From our past we can find a proud vision for the future
The men who met in the back-room of Fern's hotel on a cold June night in Ballarat in 1886 knew then, that the union that they were forming needed to do more than to just ensure justice for the shearers of colonial Victoria.
From that very first meeting they embraced the spirit of the Eureka Stockade which took place 30 years earlier; just several hundred metres up the road from their meeting place.That fighting spirit said no longer were the working men and women of Australia going to tolerate the oppression of the landed gentry and colonial powers.
We said then that a new nation needed to be formed uniting the colonies and ensuring that future Governments would govern for the many not just the few.
We laid the foundations of our democracy and fought to ensure the "fair go" would be essence of what it means to be Australian.
Our ethos, our plan of attack, our mission was put so simply by our founder William Guthrie Spence who in 1891 said that "The working man must take his proper place in the nation."
Words that were so true back when he said them, are words that are still so relevant today. Men and women of the AWU we are so fortunate to be a part of this living history - no other union members in this country can lay claim to the history that you hold on trust for future generations of AWU members.
It was our Union which lead the drive for federation and the formation of Australia as a proud, independent nation.
It was our union - our members - who after the stinging defeat of the great shearers' strike of 1891 - gathered at the union camp in Barcaldine and met under the Tree of Knowledge.
Building a new party to protect our futures
They recognised there that if we were to defeat the unholy alliance of the pastoralists and the colonial governments, who sought to indenture the working men and women of the bush, we needed to form a new party to ensure the voice of the workers would be heard across the land.
So now more than ever before we have to live up to the legacy that our past generations have left us.
We have to work out where do we as the great Australian Workers Union go to build the new workplace for a new Australian dream?
Where do we find the golden soil and the wealth for toil that that we sang for on Australia Day just past, the riches our national anthem promises?
Where do we find the reasonable dream of a home; a neighbourhood; a community;a football team to barrack for; a local school that's worthy of the name, with teachers who love their job and are keen to share what they know?
Well, it's a good question.
There's been a lot of talk since those big Wall St finance houses went belly up, and the house of cards that was so many American financial institutions cascaded into oblivion.
The answer is not in some grand new idea or amazing new plan to save our livelihoods. It's been something the AWU - in our 123 year history - have advocated for a long while now.
It's been with us for a while, and we call it nation-building - the infrastructure spending which, is a core value, in fact a fundamental value of our labour movement ... building up Australia to deliver a fairer , happier life for families across this continent.
Our history is replete with campaigns for building up things - in particular regional Australia, our birthplace and our future.
We've always stood for policies where governments invest in our continent - in roads, bridges, communication lines for all of our regions.
And it's a policy stance I've been proud to take forward so that the AWU vision will continue to influence the nation - building enterprise to build up the neighbourhoods where our people live and work.
We believe governments should provide the 'magnet' to build new cities, outside the big metropolitan areas, to attract a workforce, and wages, and schools and hospitals and football teams and community spirit in the way they used to.
Today's mining settlements we fly in and out of have no schools or hospitals worth the name, no housing estates, no sports complexes, no thirty-year plan we could book our family into.
It is all smash and grab, hit and run, dig, exploit and move on, with no sense, as there once was, that miners are people too.
We are seeing it right now as miners and other regional workers lose their jobs and are forced to move on - lack of foresight could mean we will quickly depopulate some regional centres.
We might soon be seeing new ghost towns.
But we might yet avoid that if we can get parliament, get big business and communities to sit down and plan together - how to save jobs, how to keep regions alive.
It is not too difficult act of parliament, a not too onerous dip into the shareholders' pockets, a not too unpleasant surge in the building industry, would refresh and nourish and civilise and repopulate vast tracts of the otherwise desert north and north-west, with nobody losing, Australia gaining, and union members prospering as they deserve.
The big miners, the infrastructure corporations, union and governments should get together to look at creative ways to keep our mines working, secure jobs and maintain the expensive and complex technology and infrastructure needed for a modern, productive resources industry.
We need to develop a dramatic new co-operative strategy for our all important resources sector. So we ride out this global crisis together, and ready ourselves to catch the wave as economies across the globe start to grow again and once more demand our resources.
We in the AWU want these big companies, as well as Federal, State and Local Governments to support maintenance, refurbishment, new local infrastructure and upskilling programs which will keep workers in their jobs and families in regional Australia.
Our discussions about keeping jobs alive with governments, at all levels, and corporations should put all ideas on the table.
Let's see where we can get some level of co-operative agreement.
Let's talk about the creative roles our big super funds could play in keeping people in work.
Let's talk about on the job training and skills assistance with government funding for specific sectors.
Let's talk about Industry Assistance packages made conditional on maintaining employment levels.
Let's talk about Pay-roll tax cuts - or even holidays
We see the sums already expended by governments worldwide - seven hundred billion here, twenty-five billion there - to rescue incompetent CEOs from years and decades of getting it wrong, and flying the world in corporate jets to get it wrong some more.
We could use a bit of that sort of money:
- building rail links to Longreach and Parkes and Mt Isa and Darwin,
- irrigating, with transformed sea water, the Birdsville Track,
- piping water direct from Papua New Guinea to our dust-blown north
Why do incompetent childcare czars get that sort of money?
And the shrivelling towns of the inland beg for crumbs and fragments from a Labor government that a slight adjustment of the GST, or a deflation of the dollar, would abundantly provide? Infrastructure, it's called.
Where do we get it? Well, believe me, in earnest negotiation with this newish government in Canberra in the next year or so.
We can revisit the AWU's historical vision of building a working man's paradise with good jobs and a good life for all across the width and breadth of our continent.
For the world is changing. Half the money in it vanished in the last five months.
Questions as fundamental as this will be addressed by governments worldwide in the next few months, and we, the union movement, will be there at their side to assist them in their deliberations.
Interestingly our polling about the Impact of the Global Financial Crisis on Australian workers has clearly shown that Australians expect our Government to be a leading player in defending their jobs.
You may have read bits about the polling over the weekend - we commissioned it so that it could help inform our discussions here at the National Conference about how we best protect our members in the face of this extraordinary global crisis.
Our poll shows that working families - the backbone of support for the election of Labor - strongly approve of what the Rudd Government has done to date to protect jobs.
The Federal Government, they told us, should be taking the leading role.
Most workers want the Government to adopt policies which will stimulate jobs growth in Australia by :
- Supporting Australian made procurement policies and campaigning for all Australians to support Australian made;
- Increasing the funding for important infrastructure projects - infrastructure projects which have to be built with Australian made steel and aluminium;
- Providing incentives to business to keep workers employed
- Increasing funds for schemes which retrain workers who are at risk of losing their jobs
And what is really interesting is that 59% back the government increasing spending to stimulate growth and maintain jobs even if it means the budget goes into deficit.
On the day before the Reserve Bank meets to look at interest rates - let me put my two cents worth in!
I really hope we see a substantial cut. Up to 2 per cent off interest rates. This is the most effective way to provide immediate relief for struggling families.
It will boost economic activity. Protect jobs. Provide a buffer for families. Take pressure off mortgages. Allow workers to meet other expenses. Most importantly - whatever the Reserve Bank delivers tomorrow - we expect and demand that the banks must pass on the cut in full, and quickly - no ifs, no buts.
Our poll results also show that unions are getting the thumbs up as being the most likely group in Australian society to act to protect workers.
And this support is coming not just from unionists but also from non-unionists who appreciate our work and look to us for leadership.
It may be because the poll picked up that Australian workers are feeling more stressed and preparing for the worst - almost half the respondents cite rising stress levels about job security either personally or within their families
Unions are considered more important for working people in the current climate.
There is also general agreement that unions have played a part in preventing job losses among full-time workers - an extraordinary 6 out of ten respondents to the survey believe unions have had some influence in this outcome; with 39% believing they have been quite important in preventing job losses.
Now if all of this is not an organising opportunity for the AWU I don't know what is!
Let me be clear I do not believe there is one broad stroke approach to how we best protect jobs.
Decisions can only be made on a case-by-case basis - because the diversity of our members' occupations does not allow for a one-size-fits-all policy solution.
Governments, at all levels, must play a vital role in the debate - and the solutions. They must ensure that hard-working decent Australians are not strung out to die when the mismanagement and corruption on Wall St flows down the line to affect the jobs, to hurt their pay and basic entitlements.
No measure can be placed on the importance of keeping our members in their jobs.
Delegates, the AWU is committed 100 per cent to protecting jobs in our workplaces.
The AWU is the best protection for our members; and the AWU will ensure that every member of our great union has the protection of 135,000 proud members standing behind them.
And as we move to ensure working people are protected during this global crisis we must discuss and plan how do we ensure that this great union remains able to lead that fight.
We started out in a particular district, and spread to a province, and then to a state, and then to a federation of states, and it now we operate globally.
We now talk regularly with unions from most of the world's countries to develop a new scale for our influence....an influence that grows and matches the spread of many of our global employers.
During this week our conference will discuss practical ways to make sure that even in these hard economic times we can find opportunities to grow this union.
With hard data, with commitment from our officials, delegates and members we can continue to grow this union - even during the tough times.
I will want everyone attending here to take part in this important discussion and walk away from here committed to a growth plan.
Growing our union is a fundamental task of every AWU member.
It is just as important as EBA negotiations. Just as important as representing members in grievance procedures. As important as safety inspections, and prosecutions.
Because if we do not grow, if we don't continue to organise the unorganised, and to ensure the fair go for working Australians prevails, we will be unable to ensure our existing membership maintain and expand the conditions we currently enjoy.
This is why after my election last year your National Executive embarked our organisation on an ambitious reform program.ensure that we remain the nation's largest, most powerful, most effective blue collar union. To change the way we work...To activate our representatives...To do as we have done many times before...Make sure we change with the times..,And
Since we last met in 2007 we have been busier than ever. We fought and won the unwinnable election against all odds. We demonstrated like never before the power and relevance of organised labour in our nation.
And with a new Government we had new challenges. We defied the trend, and refused to be caught up in the politics of feeling good, by ensuring that working men and women had their proper place in the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
We had changes in our leadership. We lost one of our greatest leaders, Bill Shorten who we know will continue to advocate for working people, but now in the Federal Parliament .
We also ensured that the AWU voice would be heard loud and clear in the new Government by sending a number of our people into Parliament.
We have turned a corner on growth and our reform project is working - some Branches who have incurred literally ten years of decline last year has 3 three quarters of consecutive growth.
In tough economic times we have still managed to achieve wage outcomes for our members that are amongst the best in the entire Australian workplace.
We have set the agenda on making our workplaces safer; by exposing the criminal behaviour of some mining bosses; and continue to say we will never accept asbestos in our workplaces .
We have demonstrated to the corporate world that when it comes to the safety of our members we will never compromise.
We have tried new things - reached out to some of our past enemies in the labour movement to build new alliances, to put to bed narrow destructive ideological debates of the past, to build better and stronger unions for working people as a whole.
We have achieved much - but that all could come apart so quickly, so devastatingly with the spectre of a global depression on the horizon.
The global financial crisis has left us in a truly unprecedented situation - never before in our history has so much been at risk.
These times, the tough and unprecedented times, we now experience requires the tough and unprecedented leadership for working people that only the AWU can provide.
So now is the time - to once again demonstrate as we did in the great depressions of 1891, 1929 and the 1980s that if you're part of the AWU - you're part of the strength that will deliver working class people through the tough times, and back into the sunshine.
We can do this all. We can keep the dream alive. We can make a new destiny for all - if we stick together.
If we unite and stay united as one - working people who know that unity is strength and division is death.
As our Delegate Paul Spears from One Steel said on our opening video - I know he was talking for all of us when he said - he would rather die standing on his feet than to live on his knees.
That is the battle-cry of the mighty AWU.
And I'm so proud to stand equally with you all, comrades, brothers and sisters, in fulfilling our mission to create a union that is Stronger Together.
Now delegates let's get to work.
All electoral matter is authorised by Paul Howes, National Secretary