The Accord hasn't delivered
Each year in Australia more and more people become impoverished and they aren't just the unemployed.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures show that a Level 2 single person with four children is living below the Henderson Poverty line.
A couple with four children and a Level 3.3 single income also falls within the poverty category.
Based on the ABS figures, thousands of Civil Service Association members and their children are living in poverty.
This depressing picture is more vividly illustrated by a recent Macquarie University survey which revealed that since the Hawke government came to power the rich have got richer and the poor are now poorer.
The Accord, in all of its various forms, has failed to deliver a fairer distribution of wealth to the working classes — it's as simple as that.
What's more, the Australian Council of Trade Unions must also be held accountable for the run-down in the buying power of its millions of members.
Its leader Bill Kelty — widely regarded as one of the most powerful people in Australia — has failed to deliver despite his promises that he would. And surrounding himself with a large group of union "yes" people hasn't helped him much.
It's a sad indictment of the union movement's peak body that during the eighties, with our economy booming — overheating as Paul Keating called it — the ACTU colluded with Hawke and Keating to sell its members down the drain.
A 20% reduction in real incomes is about the sum of their achievement — if you can call it that.
If Kelty were paid on performance he would be stone broke and living on the bones of his backside — instead of luxuriating in comfortable middle class luxury.
The time has come for some soul-searching by the ACTU and its state branches — including WA's Trades and Labor Council.
The strongly apolitical CSA believes that unions these days need to be independent of Labor. Many of those unions who had been affiliated with the Labor Party have recently left.
The ACTU and the TLC aren't affiliated but they are certainly in bed together and that's beginning to look unhealthy.
In 1991, with Labor celebrating its centenary, there appears to be little difference between them and the Liberals, so why should they receive any special favours.
Labor needs to wake up — workers are fed up with senior union officials trying to frighten them with the spectre of the "other mob who'll be much worse".
Maybe they will be, and heaven knows Burkie and Hawke have provided them with ample precedents.
[Reprinted, with permission, from the June edition of the WA Civil Service Association Journal.]