New ACTU secretary Sally McManus has begun her term by disgracefully encouraging the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union to carry on with its business model of deliberately breaking the law. Ms McManus is no Martin Luther King or Mohandas Gandhi. In an open democracy like Australia, if a law is unjust then you campaign for parliament to change it. And the CFMEU's activities are no freedom struggle. They are a group of well-paid workers using every rort, obstruction, and threat going to maintain their monopoly of labour on construction sites. There is more of the mob than martyrdom about them.
Labor leader Bill Shorten could not pedal away from Ms McManus fast enough: he knows how voters feel about people who put themselves above the law. A movement that has suffered the debacles of Craig Thomson, Michael Wilkinson, Kathy Jackson, and the Belans should be cleaning itself up - not breaking more laws. And that was before the departure this month of Jim Metcher, NSW head of the postal workers' union, after his history of aggression was exposed by this newspaper's Aaron Patrick and David Marin-Guzman.
This looks like the last gasp of a vanishing movement, able to cling to power only through funding and factional string pulling at the top of the Labor Party. Ms McManus sadly thinks that law breaking and disorder will make it relevant again. The opposite is more likely true.
