There can be no doubt: the workers are on their own. Neither the Labor Party nor the unions who prop it up represent blue collar workers any more.
Of course, we’ve known that for a long time. Workers have long voted with their feet: less than 15% of Australian workers are unionists – and the vast majority of those are white-collar public servants. The blue-collar working-class vote in droves for the Coalition: Labor’s heartland is the inner-city middle-class.
But it was the reaction of the union and Labor party leadership to last week’s “tradies protests” which laid bare the fundamental schism between workers and the elite class who pretend to represent them.
First, [John Setka] and the ACTU leadership pretended that most of Monday’s protesters weren’t actually union members.
Setka claimed they were anti-vaxxer extremists who’d hijacked the protest – “drunken, fascist, anti-Australian morons” and neo-Nazi “professional protesters”.
ACTU [president] Sally McManus agreed the anti-Setka protest was actually “orchestrated by violent Right-wing extremists and anti-vaccination activists”, and former Labor leader Bill Shorten, a Setka ally, abused the protesters as “hard-Right, man-baby Nazis”.
In fact, anyone watching footage of the protests couldn’t have failed to notice the proliferation of CFMEU jackets and badges on well-worn high-vis workwear. Anyone who bothered to seek out independent media rather than the craven mainstream media would have the protesters speak for themselves in the unmistakeable accents of working-class Australians, many of whom affirmed their union membership.
Membership of the very union whose boss raged, “They won’t be working in the construction industry!”
Yet much of the media ran with the lie instead, even after the Premier on Monday night confirmed the truth – with a blunder.
At 10pm, Andrews decided to close the construction industry because many workers had indeed refused his order to get vaccinated and infection rates were high.
If the protesters weren’t “real tradies” or construction workers, why shut the entire construction industry down?
Thousands of construction workers – angry at being smeared and lied about, and now without a job to go to – turned up at the CFMEU headquarters to protest again.
For hours they marched around Melbourne.
Once again, much of the media vilified them, accusing them of mass drunkenness, anarchy, criminality, chaos and thuggery.
Certainly, there were some isolated pockets of ugliness, along with the usual fringe loonies and troublemakers every protest inevitably attracts. But the protesters were a paragon of good behaviour compared to the average XR or Antifa protest.
Not that you’d know it from the police (over)reaction. The same police who stood meekly by while Antifa threw bricks and tried to overturn a bus full of people, went in truncheons swinging and rifles cracking.
So what did Premier Andrews learn from all this chaos?
To just go in harder.
To insist on mandatory vaccines, to denounce Tuesday’s protest as “ugly, unlawful”, and to say such protests “will not be tolerated”.
How blockheaded. Protests in the open air aren’t just safe – or safe enough – but an important safety valve for people under huge pressure. Why are they banned?
Why did police on Wednesday again physically confront a couple of thousand protesters at the Shrine who had been peaceful for hours, instead of letting them just have their say?
Courier-Mail
Because thugs and dictators (even elected ones) cannot tolerate even the least show of dissent.
But, the harder “Dictator Dan” cracks down and the louder thuggish John Setka rants and raves, the more obvious it becomes that the jig is up. The “party of the worker” hates actual workers. Union bosses detest their own members.
The workers are on their own.
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