Sep-Oct 2008

Costello's Club

HR Nicholls: What are the up to next?

IF the Howard Government is re-elected, we will not get a Howard Government for the next four years. Sometime, in a year or two, he will retire and Treasurer Peter Costello will likely take over.

Peter Costello is a founding member of the HR Nicholls Society -- a right wing think tank with a rabid anti-union, anti-worker agenda.

A weekend in August was set aside for a gathering of this ultra conservative, union-bashing club.

Club membership requires only one prerequisite, a hatred of the working class and a commitment to turn the clock back a century and a half to the days when unions were unheard of and working men and women were lucky to earn enough to feed their families bread and water, much less own a car, a weekender or an investment property.

Labor PM Bob Hawke labelled them industrial troglodytes. They were also once called the industrial relations branch of something that rhymes with Boo Box Ban. But we can't spell that out. They sued.

In the words of National Secretary Paddy Crumlin: "They are an extreme Right Wing forum and represent the worst face of neo-conservative intellectual thought, not only in Australia, but internationally. They are the ones that formulated the anti-worker Howard agenda in this country and have been influential in developing the extremely reactionary policies of the major corporations doing business here."

HR Nicholls boast among their ranks conservative class warriors, corporate executives and big business allies Senator Rod Kemp, former ABC director Michael Kroger, former Workplace Relations Minister Peter Reith, Paul Houlihan and Donald McGauchie of Patrick and Webb Dock infamy, Stuart Wood, vice president of the Society and a Melbourne barrister who represented Patrick Corp in the 1998 waterfront conspiracy as well as Perth building magnate Len Buckeridge.

After McGauchie's appointment as chairman of Telstra in July National Secretary Paddy Crumlin told the media it was a pay off to a loyal servant of the union bashing brigade.

Buckeridge, some members will recall, took on the Maritime Union and lost in 1993 during the Stateships dispute. He once described the MUA thus: "This merry band of thugs has held Australia to ransom from during World War II to the present day."

Buckeridge has since led the charge against construction workers and the CFMEU - as has the Society, which produced a hefty submission against the CFMEU during the Royal Commission into the Building Industry.

A Buckeridge company was recently involved in trying to set up a scab loading dock in Dampier and had a run in with the WA Branch.

News is Buckeridge never was any good, is no good now and never will be any good, was branch secretary Chris Cain's assessment.

Last year the club honoured Buckeridge with The Charles Copeman Medal. At the time police were investigating the union buster after being charged with assaulting a union activist and boasting that he was drawing up a hit list of 30 trade unionists. Buckeridge was put on a two-year good behaviour bond. The CFMEU described him as "a man who admits he was been involved in conspiracy to murder".

The Charles Copeman Medal, by the way, was struck to commemorate the Robe River, Pilberra strikebreaker mining boss Copeman for "services to industrial reform" in the mid eighties.

Copeman sacked his senior management announcing all agreements with unions were cancelled, locked out striking workers and hit the union with writs demanding millions.

A year earlier, in 2002, the HR Nicholls awarded Peter Reith the same medal hailing him as the best IR minister in 50 years for backing Chris Corrigan during the waterfront conspiracy and for displaying qualities of 'judgement fortitude and coolness under fire'.

"All Australians were in debt to Peter Reith," said former Secretary to the Commonwealth Treasury, and founding President of the Society, John Stone, on presenting the medal.

The winner of the 2004 union-busting, worker-bashing medal is Peter Bosa, boss of Odco labour hire network (alias Troubleshooters non-union labour hire firm). Bosa boasts of investing $2 million in legal disputes with unions and state Labor governments.

The HR Nicholls Society was set up in 1985 and named after the former editor of the Tasmanian daily tabloid The Mercury. In 1911 Nicholls was charged with contempt of court for criticising High Court Judge and Arbitration Court President Mr Justice HB Higgins. He was subsequently acquitted and became a hero of the right.

The Society formed in response to the Hawke Government review of the industrial relations system. Costello, the annointed successor to PM John Howard was by then already a veteran warrior against workers. He played a key legal role in all major disputes of the past three decades as the employers' barrister in the union busting Dollar Sweets, Mudginberri and Troubleshooters disputes.

Previous guest speakers at Society conventions include Nicholas Finney OBE, one of the principal driving forces behind the abolition of the National Dock Labour Scheme in the UK in 1989.

This year the special guest speaker was a leading conservative US lawyer Richard Epstein who campaigns to axe workplace discrimination laws. Other speakers were Peter Anderson, Director of Workplace Policy for the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and former adviser to Reith, and Abbott as well as Mark Harrison, the conservative academic behind the report advocating privatisation of education. He put the teachers union under fire. Des Moore of the Institute for Private Enterprise also spoke at the convention.

The IR Club 'philosophy' still prevails in the AIRC and 12 of the first 16 Howard Government appointees to the Commission were Club members, he told the conference.

Happily, a barometer of the Society's declining power is that at last year's annual right wing bash they called long and loud for the Howard Government to launch big bang IR reform before calling for a double dissolution when it was blocked by the Senate. This was one piece of advice that was not taken up in Canberra.

But only a year earlier society member and then IR minister Tony Abbott did make good on his promise that the Government would actively intervene in the commissions and the courts against unions.

In April 2002, Abbott's government wigs were in the Commission standing alongside foreign shipowners opposing the Maritime Union's first move to rope the CSL Pacific and their guest workers under the award while they were trading on our coast.

In July they won a major battle with a NSW court ruling that prevents the commission having any jurisdiction over individual contracts, a key weapon in the clubs crusade to kill industrial relations and replace it with the 'rule of law'.

This has been a tactic of the Society adopted by the conservative Howard Government to drive unions bankrupt by forcing them out of the workers courts where matters are settled without hefty legal bills and 'bleed them dry' in protracted legal action requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars, battalions of barristers and top silk.

We also have the HR Nicholls Society to thank for the development of the secondary boycott legislation used to hamstring unions by outlawing strikes and industrial action.

"For the past 25 years the radical neo-liberals have engaged in a sustained assault upon the welfare state, trade unions, social justice movements and the Left in general," said Dr Damien Cahill, Honorary Research Fellow in History and Politics at the University of Wollongong.

"Radical neo-liberals advocate deregulation, privatisation, marketisation, and massive cuts to government expenditure. They have been in the vanguard of the transfer of resources from public to private and the transfer of power from labour to capital. This, after all, is what neo-liberalism is all about."