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When I was a young bloke I could literally walk to the end of my street and be in a paddock. Quite often those paddocks would have livestock in them and my favourite livestock was sheep.
On a ‘bad’ day it was fun climb through the wire fence and chase them. They ran away of course and jumped and bleated and basically got into a spot of bother. On a ‘good’ day, when I was feeling a little more humane (as young lads can be rather nasty at times) I would climb slowly through the fence and try not to disturb them. If things went well I was able to approach the sheep without them running away.
What I recall most about the sheep is their smell and the feel of their wool. The very tips of each strand were hard and dirty but if I ran my fingers down into the fleece it was slightly oily, warm and very soft. Occasionally sticks or burrs would be embedded in the fleece and I would gently pull those out. If it had been raining the outer layer would be wet and have that smell of wet wool but, just like on the dry days, the inner fleece would be dry and warm.
But, as inevitably happens, time moves on. The fields are now a housing estate and the sheep are kept in small pens ready for export to other parts of the world and my idyllic Saturday afternoon walks with the sheep are long gone.
In the 1980’s I was working at a small factory in Granville in Sydney’s Western suburbs. There were about seven or eight of us employed there. It was dirty work and involved the use of some very dangerous chemicals and compounds. It was not my ideal job but with a newly born son to consider and the fact that the factory was only a 10 minute walk from home led me to conclude that, well, it was a job.
Just before Easter in the second year I was there the boss came in to the tea room and told us that due to ‘economics’ he was going to sack us all. You can imagine the reaction I’m sure. The employees were mostly young migrants. Other than the two Spanish speaking women there I’m pretty sure that, at 23, I was the eldest employee.
Not all was doom and gloom the boss told us. We would get paid out our full entitlements and two weeks leave above that. He told us that after Easter we could all come back and start our jobs again only we would be reemployed as casuals because he couldn’t guarantee the work. He told us he was sorry but he had no choice. He said he hoped things would pick up and that our pay envelopes would be ready at knock off time.
We had our two weeks off and came back. The boss told us he had some good news. He had a couple of new contracts and would have to employ extra people. However I was not comfortable with that and rang a union to find out what we could do. Perhaps I had waited until too late. I made calls to various unions and found at that unless we joined up – it was an un-unionised workplace – there was nothing they could do. None of the others wanted to cause trouble so nothing happened. Nothing happened that is until the boss called me into his office and said he had to ‘let me go’, handed me my pay and said goodbye.
Times have moved on since the 1980s and the reforms brought in by the Hawke and Keating governments. You remember them? They were the ones who instigated the so called “accords”, the deals that saw union mergers and infighting among those who were supposed to look after the rights of workers. You know the ones. The union leaders who rolled over and sucked up to the “worker’s party” but who, along with the working class in Australia, got shafted.
Like sheep being led to the slaughter, Australian workers allowed their union representatives to bargain away their future job security and conditions and paved the way for the current government to introduce their “workplace reforms”. And now, in the aftermath of the Cowra meat workers fiasco, we find nothing has really changed unless we look deeper into the Australian state of mind.
In a speech given at the University of Melbourne and printed in the Age, Adam Brandt, an industrial lawyer, points out that the provisions of the new workplace laws and the anti-terrorism act share many similarities. He argues that the state, rather than shrinking in the face of what is loosely termed ‘globalisation’, has in fact, extended its reach even further into the lives of ordinary Aussies.
Workplace laws, just like the anti-terror laws have stripped away many of our basic rights. The right to silence when questioned by government officers, the right to peaceful assembly whether to demonstrate, picket or even hold a stop work meeting and the right to representation by a lawyer of your choice, should things escalate to that level, have all been removed from Australian citizens.
These developments didn’t happen overnight. You will probably be familiar with John Howard and many of his long time colleagues telling us that for the last 20 to 25 years they have been trying to implement these workplace laws. Given their view of how society operates these laws and the anti-terror laws fit hand in glove with each other because, as we know, to not want to work is “un-Australian” therefore deeming you to be a “threat” to the “Australian way of life” and therefore a potential “terrorist” or “terrorist sympathiser”.
It is not necessarily John Howard’s fault these new laws exist. It is we, the workers and citizens of Australia who have allowed him and those before him, to establish the conditions under which we now find ourselves subjected. It is we who have brought this on ourselves.
I realise that many people have been fighting these changes and the efforts of those who have not lain down in the face of overwhelming odds should be applauded. However, the silent majority who survey after survey reveal are gravely concerned about where we are headed fail to materialise and lend support to the vocal few. The vast majority of Australian’s, like me at that Granville factory, have waited too long before taking the necessary action to prevent our rights from being removed.
We, as a nation, it seems, are more like the sheep at the end my boyhood street, milling around eating our grass and basking in the warmth of the ‘economic’ climate. When, through the metaphorical fence a “bogy man” appears, we seem to react with a pre-programmed fear and attempt to flee to the far corners of our paddock. If the same person appears and gently persuades us that we have nothing to fear and may even have a burr or other irritant attended to, we snuggle up and let them run their fingers through our hair.
The sheep at the end of my street were dumb animals that reacted with nothing more than instinct. However, for them, having the wool pulled over their eyes was a part of life I suppose. I wonder what our excuse is?