The SDA leadership continues resist reality, damaging the PM and the ALP brand in the process. This was in business insider a few days ago:
"Some apparent dissidents in Australia’s largest union, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (or SDA), are today calling on the organisation’s boss to reveal the research which he claims shows most of the country’s retail sectors workers are opposed to same-sex marriage.
That boss is Joe de Bruyn, a member of the national ALP executive and hugely influential figure in Labor party circles. The union, known as the SDA, has over 200,000 members.
A conservative Catholic, de Bruyn is a fierce opponent of same-sex marriage and says the majority of SDA members agree with his position.
Now a group called SDA Members for Equality want him to reveal the research that de Bruyn says was conducted a couple of years ago. The Canberra Times reports:
Mr de Bruyn said the union had “some years ago” discussed with a representative sampling of members the view that marriage was between a man and woman and received overwhelming support.
“We believe that this continues to be the view of the overwhelming majority of the members of the union,” he said.
The request by SDA Members for Equality is a reasonable one. It’s hard to square de Bruyn’s comments with the published polling which for some years has been showing around 60% or more of Australians support same-sex marriage.
(And that’s before asking why an organisation that represents people working on shop floors needs a trenchant position on same-sex marriage in the first place.)"
The people he lived among seem hardly surprised by the attention. On the day Margaret Thatcher's death was announced, it was a talking point as John Fox chatted to customers pumping diesel into plastic containers at his garage in Ballinamore.
A car was waiting for fuel at the pump, but John was good humoured as his work was interrupted – obviously not for the first time – with questions about the McGahern connection. On the demise of the Iron Lady, he remarked: "They won't be crying about her around here."
Having featured in not just one but two of McGahern's most celebrated works, Fox is probably resigned to the fact that even a glimpse of him filling petrol stops some people in their tracks.
When I visited Ballinamore a couple of years ago, I met John Fox in his petrol station and was similarly stopped in my tracks. It's a bit like meeting the actor in one of your favourite long-running TV dramas, you feel that you 'know them' but have to remind yourself that you know a fictionalised character, not the person standing in front of you.
When I was at the Fox garage he moved away after a brief conversation to serve a customer leaving me to talk with one of his younger colleagues. Before Fox left, we got to talking about the differences between Mohill and Ballinamore. I was sceptical that two towns so close together (about 25 kms from memory) could be very different. Fox's colleague told me (with a twinkle in his eye) that the black and tans had been stationed in Mohill and many of their descendants still lived there and "some of them haven't had the horns bred out of them yet".
One of McGahern's faourite novels was Stoner by John Williams. (McGahern also greatly admired The Great Gatsby and Jane Austen's Persuasion, which he said were the two most perfect novels in the english language).
Although ignored early on Stoner is now considered a classic. It has recently been translated into French, prompting this NPR story (thanks to Professor Jackson for the pointer):
Fast forward to today and the book is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. It is a best-seller across much of Europe, including the Netherlands, where it has been the best-selling novel for the past two months. But it is not the action-packed thriller or steamy romance you might expect to be topping the charts. It is a quiet, slim novel about a young man who leaves a hardscrabble farm in Missouri to become a literature professor in 1910.
"It sort of pays tribute to a man whose life is, in one sense, utterly ordinary, but, in another sense, rich as anyone's life can be," said Edwin Frank, who runs New York Review of Books Classics, which republished Stoner in 2006.
I love Stoner and highly recommend it.
Another McGahern favourite that I also love is Alistair MacLeod. MacLeod is a Canadian writer of Scottish highlander descent. His short stories, in particular, are very evocative.
There can be few worse things in the world of PR than transparently ridiculuous efforts to dress bad news as triumphs of corporate ingenuity.
Today, Ford Australia announced it will cut 1200 jobs.
Bad enough news to draw media comment from the prime minister, deputy prime minister and many others.
This is the headline from Ford's media release: Ford Accelerates Australian Business Transformation.
Worse still, the lead paragraph:
Ford is transforming its Australian business by accelerating the introduction of new products for Australian customers, enhancing the sales and service experience, and improving its business efficiency and profitability.
You don't burnish your reputation with childish corporate spin.
The effort to do so is insulting to your employees, journalists and the broader public.
At the end of next week a 'special symposium' will be hosted by Macquarie University to mark the three decades since the ALP-ACTU deal helped to elect the Hawke Government in 1983. The good and the great of the Accord era will be there (Hawke, Crean, Kelty etc) as will many enthusiasts from the academic community.
The Accord was Australia's odd experiment in corporatism at the national level. Odd because the labour movement (or at least its leaders) seemed to embrace corporatism at the same time and, at least on the political side, with the same enthusiasm as it embraced the neo-liberal agenda then sweeping the anglophone world.
The
ACTU’s adoption of independence and external lobbying involves a direct
rejection of the dependence and internal lobbying approach involved in the
social democratic style Accord arrangement. The adoption of union
revitalisation strategies is based in critiques of the impact of these social
democratic arrangements on union vitality and membership engagement.
In
fact, for the critics inside today’s union movement, the Accord is viewed
through the lens of a contemporary focus on re-building membership. The Accord
was good for working people, but it was, they say, bad for unions.
While a
few interviewees found merit in both the Accord and the organising model, seeing
them as appropriate responses to the circumstances of their times, most leaned
one way or the other.
I have worked in politics, public policy and strategic communications for over 30 years. I was recently awarded a doctorate in Australian politics at the University of Sydney. My thesis was on the (changing) relationship between the ALP and unions. I have been blogging since November 2003 and over the past decade I have written many articles on politics, public relations and social media for newspapers, magazines and websites. I love literature particularly John McGahern and James Joyce.
The header photo is of the Clarence River taken before dawn at Ulmarra in 2012.
