“”. Powerful people who make short lists of Australian Values on their own might do better to discuss these values with others, and, perhaps, at length.
If it were possible to describe a big thing like a value in a rush, philosophers of all cultures would have made bumper stickers instead of heavy books and complex myth and song. And, if it were possible to decide on a big thing like a national value without asking the nation what it thought, it wouldn’t be at all Australian.
This past January 26, I took the train to Melbourne’s Parliament Station and found myself among 60,000 folks discussing an Australian value: survival. We’d assembled to acknowledge that the first people of this land survived. Survival is something to celebrate. It is celebrated. On this feel-good basis alone, survival should move to the top of the Australian Values list that can never be written by one, but the many.
Between us, I’d say survival is already an Australian value. It’s one of those things—like or the —non-Aboriginal people adopted from those who were here long before.
In 1854, the Eureka Stockade was a movement and a barrier built by poor migrants who’d come from many nations to try their luck ion the goldfields.
Australian workers were among the first in Western nations to demand that their needs for survival be met. In 1891, a largely white group of shearers set down tools and said they wouldn’t touch another sheep until wealthy landholders quit driving the men so hard for so little. In 1854, the Eureka Stockade was a movement and a barrier built by poor migrants who’d come from many nations to try their luck on the goldfields. These folks told the bosses of the time, British colonial rulers, to give it up with the theft of their own hard labour.
Last week in Melbourne, again. A campaign called Change the Rules was last month by ACTU Secretary Sally McManus.
The return by the union movement to the value of survival is way past due.
If you’re young, you may be shocked to learn that once, a majority of Australian workers could afford to buy a home, could count on regular holidays, could be paid even when they had a nasty flu and could avoid the fear that they might not have any work next week due to being “casual”, “contractor” or “self-employed”. You could, if you were not one of this land’s true survivors, survive—let’s not forget that Aboriginal people have been largely excluded from paid labour since the time their means of survival, land, was stolen.
There was a time when trade unions—for years, organisations of white men and women—took lessons of survival from Aboriginal people. Kevin Cook is one bloke, now gone, who . Survival is less tricky when you stick together. Survival is much easier when you set aside all the rubbish in your head—mistrust of migrants, condescension toward women—and say to your comrade, “Yeah. I’m a survivor, too.” He was one of several Aboriginal unionists who, for a brief time, made survival a priority for unions.
You want to know what a union can do for survival, then seek out the doco . One short-lived union called the BLF set the value of survival into its organisation, and all survivors had a say in what unions could demand: that women be permitted to work on building sites, that public housing not be demolished, that Aboriginal and migrant voices be heard. This “let’s survive together” thing worked well.
I know you millennials are burnt out; that you often go from gig to gig and can’t see a way out of the bedroom of your childhood.
I’d love to say that Change The Rules will achieve what an organisation with members and allies who were feminist, non-English speaking, Aboriginal, posh, poor, academic, illiterate or homeless did. I will say that it can. But, that depends on you.
I know you millennials are ; that you often go from gig to gig and can’t see a way out of the bedroom of your childhood. I’m not telling you “it depends on you” because I’m an old grump—although, I am. I’m telling you that a better future depends on you because that’s the truth.
McManus strikes me as a decent person. But what strikes me as best is a list of rules that need to be changed and values that need to be shared that is written by us all.
Being a union member isn’t easy. I nagged my union for years to let me join a union conversation.
Last week, they answered me, and let me bang on. I think they may have even listened. But I know that to survive, they’ve got to listen to us all.
It's not a matter of McManus, or any union leader, allowing you to be heard. It’s a case of you demanding it. It’s a case of remembering survival as a real Australian value. It’s a case of building on this value and creating a better one:a nation of people that share in the abundance all of us people have built.
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