The union is the members. The job of officials is to serve and inform.

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If elected branch secretary, I will ensure that:

• The branch employs a lawyer who will give members rapid and reliable service on issues of compensation, occupational health and safety, and workplace grievances such as written warnings.
• The branch employs an organiser in Gladstone.
• Any member can phone the Brisbane branch office number, any day, including weekends, and reach an official rostered on duty for that time.
• The branch Special Purposes Fund audited accounts are published to members every quarter.
• The branch will organise a series of port delegates’ conferences, starting within three months of me taking office.
• The branch will organise quarterly meetings of all stevedoring employees in the Port of Brisbane.
• The branch will publish and distribute a members’ newsletter every week. The branch will select a Communications Officer, responsible for getting out the newsletter and running a lively and informative branch website, updated weekly, and open to comments and postings from members.

I will do these things because I believe that a union is made strong by:
• its members getting honest and full information
• members and delegates regularly meeting to debate and discuss with each other
• the officials serving the members.

For over a decade now our union leadership has scaled down its aims to damage-limitation, and trained the membership in the same poverty of aspiration. Under my leadership the branch will reverse that trend. It will do that by harnessing all the work of the branch officials to improving the information and organisation available to members.
By doing that we can defeat casualisation.
A casualised workforce is a workforce divided between permanents and casuals — inevitably so, to some degree, despite the best efforts by delegates.
It is a weaker workforce. It is a less safe workforce, because workers dependent for their next pay on an employer’s favour must be less likely to raise safety issues than workers with permanent status.
The branch will campaign to make Patricks and DP World accept interhire of casuals.
It will campaign to make the database for seafarers open and transparent, so that employers are unable to headpick.
It will campaign progressively to force the companies to accept stricter and stricter limits to the numbers of casuals they can employ, and to take on existing casuals as permanent workers.
It will campaign for the hiring of casuals to be regulated by agreed rotas and waiting lists, rather than employers’ arbitrary decision.

It will make the MUA a leader in the fight to win decent and secure employment conditions for workers across the whole economy.

Everywhere, privatisation means undermining union strength and secure employment conditions. When the Queensland state government privatised wholesale, the MUA responded passively.
The “Queensland Not For Sale” fiasco, in which our union failed to take any leading or active role in combatting privatisation, showed the current leadership unworthy of our movement’s forefathers on whose shoulders we stand.
Under my leadership the MUA Queensland branch will not involve itself in ALP machinations over the heads of the membership.
It will use the union’s representation in the Australian Labor Party, both at state level and nationally, openly to champion workers’ interests and challenge the ALP leaders. What the union says and does in the ALP will be democratically discussed and decided by MUA members.
The MUA will speak out in the same way that South Australian unions are currently speaking out for the removal of Mike Rann as unworthy to be a Labor representative. It will not let issues drop once a token victory has been gained, as the NSW unions let issues drop once Morris Iemma had been ousted and his particular variant of electricity privatisation blocked.
My opponents in this election charge me with being a “Trotskyist”.
I believe that: “There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people, and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
“The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.
“Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labour”.
I want to replace the unequal dog-eat-dog society of capitalism by a cooperative commonwealth. That free cooperative commonwealth will be as distant from the stifling, unequal societies of the old Soviet Union and Maoist China as it will be from market capitalism.
That is the philosophy that guides me as a trade unionist. It is for MUA members to choose between that and the current policy of bureaucratic inertia and timid damage-limitation.

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