Winning Forumula

It was Tas Bull who formalised international and national solidarity, holding executive posts simultaneously on both the ACTU and the ITF. Bull was among the first union leaders to foresee globalism and to adapt the union accordingly.

His contemporaries on the wharves recall how it was Tas who pushed for the union to take a stand for exploited seafarers visiting our ports - the genesis of Australia's Flag of Convenience campaign. And after becoming a national organiser it was Tas who lobbied to have the WWF affiliate with the ITF. He then became the first ITF Australia co-ordinator.

When the downtrodden called from the ships or from their occupied territories of Timor, Palestine or the apartheid ghettos and prisons of South Africa, the wharves stopped.

From bans on Fijian cargo in 1987 after the Bavadra Labor Government was deposed in a military coup, to bans French shipments during nuclear testing in the South Pacific, a decade of rolling bans on South African shipping line Safocean Pty (1973-1985), the 1982 week long ban on Zim Line ships during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon (despite having once been a guest of the Israeli government) to black bans on Indonesian ships and cargo after the Dili massacre at Santa Cruz Cemetery in 1992. Just to name a few.

Tas Bull always kept one foot on the world platform, one planted firmly on the ground and a hot line to the Melbourne office of Bill Kelty at the ACTU.

In the Patrick lockout that work was recognised around the world. Even impoverished Indian dockworkers chipped in at the time. They felt they owed us.

For it worked both ways.

In the dark of night the phone would ring from a seafarer in distress somewhere at sea or in a foreign port. "We have no food. They pay no wages. We arrive next week. Can you help us?"

365 Sussex Street became the defacto ministry for foreign affairs. The dispossessed, the downtrodden and the deposed would seek audience with Tas Bull.

He once remarked that if the union stopped the wharves every time we had a visit and report of brutality, they'd never start again.

Tas Bull was also a pragmatist.

When the Accord pay rise for the low paid and industrially weak got blocked the wharves would stop.

This may have made the union unpopular with conservative business and political leaders. But walk the wharves of Cape Town, Jakarta, Beirut or Bombay and let people know you are an Australian and their response is immediate. "You have good unions. How do we do it here?"