Palm Sunday refugee rally 2021

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Australia is holding about a hundred Medevaced refugees in hotels, and there are hundreds more people offshore in PNG and Nauru, caught in unimaginable limbo. Earlier in the month a vigil was held in Garema Place for the Murugappan family from Biloela, who have now been in detention on Christmas Island for over three years. Their many supporters in Biloela continue to call for their release.

The theme of this year’s Palm Sunday rally organised by the Refugee Action Campaign of Canberra was “Resist Cruelty“.

Union groups, religious groups, political parties were all represented. Speakers including former Canberra Times Editor Jack Waterford and Anglican Rev. Roberta Hamilton spoke to the crowd, which then marched out of Garema Place and around the centre of town.

Vintage Reds marched with the banner to show support.

March 2021 Guest speaker, Dr Anita Chan

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Dr Anita Chan kindly agreed to speak to us on “Hong Kong’s New Trade Union Movement”. Anita is an active member of the Vintage Reds. She is a labour sociologist and a visiting fellow at the ANU.

photo: Bell School, Australian National University

We include here a summary of Anita’s published article by the same title, as provided by the journal International Union Rights, no.4, vol.27, 2020.

FOCUS | TRADE UNION RIGHTS IN ASIA

Hong Kong’s New Trade Union Movement

For a whole year from mid-2019 to mid-2020, Hong Kong was rocked by mass demonstrations and street violence.

At its height, two million out of Hong Kong’s population of seven million marched in a huge demonstration against a proposed extradition bill. The international press heavily covered the mass protests; but what the press has not covered is the birth of a new trade union movement from within this political and social movement.

The protests, and the new unions, were led by a generation born a few years before and after 1997, the year when China gained sovereignty over Hong Kong, a British colony for 150 years. Hong Kong was to be governed by a constitution known as the Basic Law, which guaranteed that for the next fifty years Hong Kong’s neoliberal capitalist system and civil liberties would not be tampered with by China’s authoritarian regime.

It did not turn out this way. In the past two decades China gradually began to intervene in Hong Kong politically, instigating increasing resistance from the Hong Kong populace in the form of mass rallies. This led to the Umbrella Revolution of 2014 in which the central business district was occupied for months by protestors. When it was suppressed, the protesters left behind a huge banner declaring “We’ll Be Back!”

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Canberra Union Voices raised again!

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Director Chrissie Shaw, a legend in Canberra theatrical circles, is back leading the Canberra Union Voices, starting with the year’s first practice on Wednesday 3 March 2020.

Every town needs a good union choir, and here is ours, for all interested singers to join. A recent quote from an anonymous singer:

“I have found it to be an incredibly pleasurable experience.  Chrissie teaches us how to breathe properly, and there are warm up scales and many wonderful union songs.”

Practices are at 2 – 3.30 p.m. at the Dickson Tradies Club. The cost is $20.00 per week or $75.00 for the term.

Contact: Andrew Blankensee 0421 193 794.

 Photo: Canberra Union Voices, 2010, from the archive.

“Women of Steel” — BHP in Wollongong

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Film director Robynne Murphy came to one of our meetings in 2019 (read about this below), with news about her film “Women of Steel”, at that time still in the making.

Since then the film has been completed and last year it was a documentary finalist in the Sydney Film Festival. “Women of Steel” also won the History Council of NSW’s 2020 Applied History Award; and was a finalist in the 2020 ATOM (Australian Teachers of Media) Best Documentary awards, in the two categories of History, and Social & Political Issues.

Recently a number of Vintage Reds found they had all had the same excellent idea and booked tickets to see the film at Smith’s in Alinga Street. It’s a wonderful story, beautifully told, and the audience went away uplifted and impressed by what can be achieved by people coming together with a common purpose. It was particularly moving that most of the women were migrants and took on a reluctant and powerful company (BHP) in a second language.

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Miles Franklin in America

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Verna Coleman, Miles Franklin in America, Her Unknown (Brilliant) Career
(Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1981)

Reviewed by Adrian Cameron, March 2021

In 2013 I attended in Canberra a conference for the Australian Teachers of History as part of Canberra’s Centenary celebrations. One of the most impressive speakers was Professor Marilyn Lake. She was looking at Australia in 1913. It was her view that in those days Australia was seen internationally to be the pinnacle of progressive development. She argued that the link between “progressives” in Australia and the USA (particularly in Chicago) was strong and that the Americans were very impressed with the steps being taken by the new nation. She indicated that she was writing a book on this link, which arrived in the Yass Library six years later!

Stella Miles Franklin started work in a Department Store. Then later, via a network that linked across the Pacific, she joined the National Women Trade Union League. As an employee, she travelled on their behalf across many parts of the USA to support workers and unionists involved in major union action.

Though she started as just an administrative assistant, eventually she became editor of ‘Life and Labour’, a journal on working women, for the NWTU. In this role, Stella Franklin attended the 1912 Progressive Party presidential convention, where former president Theodore Roosevelt was nominated as their candidate after he had broken away from the Republicans. He was unsuccessful and progressive policies (pro-union and pro-women) were lost.

Having had my interest in this period developed, I came across this book on Miles Franklin. Franklin left Australia in 1906 to seek literary success overseas but arrived in San Francisco just days after the devastating earthquake! After assisting with voluntary work she then headed for Chicago, which was then seen as both the best and worst of life in a Mega-City.

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February 2021 Guest Speaker, John Merritt

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“A Brief History of Labour History”

John is a retired ANU history department academic whose PhD was a history of the Federated Ironworkers Association. He was a foundation member of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. He has written on the AWU and on the topic of Strikes; and a more recent work is Losing Ground: Grazing in the Snowy Mountains, 1944-1969.

In the 1950s and 1960s, all Australian universities taught labour history. But by the early 1970s, this was no longer true. Why had it been so popular? Why did it then decline?

A few things should be mentioned about the popularity of labour history in these years.

In 1930 W.K. Hancock wrote a short history of Australia, in which he characterised Labor parties as parties of “initiative”, and conservative parties as parties of “resistance”. In the 1940s and 1950s, Labor was seen to be leading the way into the future.

Secondly, Robin Gollan arrived at the ANU’s Research School of Social Sciences [in 1953], an ex-Communist Party member; and later the author of Radical & Working Class Politics (1960). Lots of students wanted to work with him.

And thirdly, Robert Menzies established Commonwealth Scholarships [in 1951], which enabled a lot of people to go to university who might not have been able to otherwise. For people of working-class background, labour history was partly their own family history.

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November 2020 Guest speaker, Marie Coleman

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Our guest speaker was the excellent Marie Coleman, speaking on the “Gender Lens on the Budget“, an annual review conducted by the National Foundation of Australian Women, of which Marie was a foundation member. Among her long, long list of work done and positions held, Marie was:

… the first woman in Australia to head a statutory authority when she chaired the Whitlam Government’s Social Welfare Commission in 1973.

(text and photo from NFAW website)

The NFAW’s Gender Lens documents pick apart the federal government’s 2020 Budget, revealing how different groups in the community have been affected. Older women, for example:

Overall, …the 2020 Budget is a missed opportunity to improve the lives of older women who face the greatest difficulties: single, older renters totally reliant on JobSeeker or pension payments; those who are homeless; a significant proportion of those on the long waiting list for home care packages; and those locked out of employment.

It is also another missed opportunity to begin resetting policy to disrupt the structural accumulation of poverty across the life course that reaches its peak with disastrous consequences for so many women in later life.

[www.ag.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-03/National-plan-to-respond-to-the-abuse-of-older-australians-elder.pdf]

October 2020 Guest speaker, Bill Bush, Families & Friends for Drug Law Reform

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Families and Friends for Drug law Reform began in March 1995 following the death by overdose of 8 young people in Canberra. Following contact with Michael Moore, then Independent Member of the ACT Legislative Assembly, a meeting was called to include families who had been affected. Forty people attended this first meeting which was the beginning of FFDLR. All in attendance believed that the drug laws were more the problem than the solution and called for change. They wanted laws and policies that caused less harm. They wanted addiction to be treated as a health and social issue not a law enforcement one. They believed that the huge profits made by the illegal trade made drugs more available to their kids.

One of the first successes of this group was influencing the non-attendance of police at overdoses unless violence or death were involved. This meant that friends would not be afraid of police involvement and were more likely to call an ambulance if a friend was in trouble. [from FFDLR website]

Bill has been with this organisation for some time, and spoke on the topic of “Why Drug Law Reform?” He outlined the history of the group and the many campaigns they have undertaken to reform our outdated and ineffective drug laws. He provided much data and information about the history of illicit drug taking, and the impact of newer drugs on the mental health of users. He outlined the programs that have been successfully implemented in more progressive countries – ones that Australia could learn from.

Jane thanked Bill for his presentation and presented him with a VR coffee mug in appreciation.

A postscript: A week after Bill’s talk the FFDLR’s 25th annual remembrance ceremony was held at Weston Park, under the flowering black locust tree which is a symbol of hope.

A second postscript: Two years later in October 2022, it was reported that the ACT government had decriminalised possession of small amounts of commonly used illicit drugs, becoming the first jurisdiction to do so in the country.

September 2020 Guest speaker, Bernard Collaery

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We were happy to welcome Bernard Collaery, who spoke on the moral drift of this government, beginning with the Children Overboard scandal; massive Australian foreign policy blunders in the Pacific; and the government’s extraordinary case against him and Witness K over East Timor.

Bernard’s book, Oil Under Troubled Water: Australia’s Timor Sea Intrigue, was published by Melbourne University Publishing earlier in the year. Here is MUP’s blurb:

Charged, with Witness K, for allegedly breaching the Intelligence Services Act, Bernard Collaery provides the whole sordid backstory to Australian politics’ biggest scandal’.

In May 2018 Bernard Collaery, a former Attorney-General of the Australian Capital Territory and long-term legal counsel to the government of East Timor, was charged by the Australian Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions with conspiracy to breach the Intelligence Services Act 2001. He was forbidden from talking about the charges against him, but under parliamentary privilege independent MP Andrew Wilkie revealed what has since been described as ‘Australian politics’ biggest scandal’.

Five years earlier, after ASIO officers raided Collaery’s home and office, Collaery told journalists that ASIS had been bugging the East Timorese government during negotiations over Timor Sea oil. He was about to represent East Timor; as well as calling the evidence of a former senior ASIS agent known publicly only as Witness K, at The Hague in a case against the Australian government.

Oil Under Troubled Water relates the sordid history of Australian government dealings with Eat Timor, and how the actions of both major political parties have enriched Australia and its corporate allies at the expense of its tiny neighbour and wartime ally, one of the poorest nations in the world.

August 2020 Guest Speakers, Kasey Tomkins and Matthew Harrison

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Kasey Tomkins, UnionsACT campaign manager; and Josh Thornton, AMWU, spoke about the UnionsACT 2020 territory elections campaign. The strategy is to “back candidates who back workers” and the campaign is not party-specific. The candidates are being asked to sign a pledge supporting the unions’ six core values. It is not until the candidates return the pledge that UnionsACT will know which candidates they will be supporting. Election campaigning is restricted, with limited resources and social distancing rules in place, though social media and letterboxing continue.

Matthew Harrison, the new Secretary of UnionsACT, introduced himself to the Vintage Reds and spoke about his settling in time and plans for the future. The Territory elections are his first real project in the new job. The plans for the future include:

- a new injured worker network, including mental health, to cover those who don’t fit the system, and those in smaller unions unable to help.

- a gender violence project, especially welcomed by nurses and hospo workers.

- the young workers’ centre. The “summer patrol” in operation in Canberra has already been renamed the “safety patrol”. Many young workers have been very badly affected by the corona pandemic.