From The Age, at: http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000531/A27715-2000May30.html On the battle front By ROBIN USHER Wednesday 31 May 2000 This is not a good time for heroes. In an age of political and economic uniformity, it's hard to tell the goodies from the baddies. Even victories by defenders of the established order become more and more uncertain with the passing of time. Take the waterfront dispute that dominated news headlines for much of 1998. It ended with the sacked workers from the Maritime Union of Australia marching triumphantly back to the wharves after claiming victory in the courts. That is the image many people remember. But in the year after the dispute, the Patrick stevedoring company that had sacked the wharfies reported a profit of $36 million, after losses of $63 million the previous year. This was the immediate result of a reduced workforce and higher productivity following the dispute. Playwright Peter Houghton is aware of the risks in trying to pick winners and losers. But the dramatic potential of the waterfront dispute was too great for him to pass up. In his new play, Front, which opens at St Kilda's Theatreworks on June 14, Houghton examines the impact on ordinary men and women of what he calls a defining moment in the battle between two ideologies - the tradition of a regulated, unionised workforce against the free-market forces unleashed by globalisation. "It was such a great story that I just had to get something on stage," he says. "But to be dramatic I had to take huge liberties with events to concentrate the action to within a week between seven characters who were the pawns in the dispute." This dramatic licence will have a big impact on how the complexities of the dispute are portrayed. In a recent book, Waterfront, journalists Helen Trinca and Anne Davies devote the first half to the political and legal manoeuvring that took place before the security men and their dogs came on to the nation's wharves and drove off the unionists. They detail months of planning by Prime Minister John Howard, Workplace Relations Minister Peter Reith, Patrick boss Chris Corrigan and the National Farmers Federation, among others. It was the federation that recruited and trained rural workers to replace the sacked unionists on the wharves. All these are Houghton's ideological bad guys. Although he says there are winners and losers on both sides, his heroes are the unionised workers. They come from close-knit communities and were supported in their hour of need on the picket lines by ordinary Australians in all the capital cities. No doubt this is an idealised portrait, although the actions of Reith and Corrigan, in particular, did not go down well in the courts. And the balaclava-wearing security guards with their dogs shocked many Australians. Houghton has a relative who is a wharfie and his play is being produced by Melbourne Workers Theatre, so it is not hard to guess where his sympathies lie. "But it is not righteous soapbox propaganda, nor is it a sentimental homage to the great and good working class," he says. "The problem is that, in the global economy, it is assumed by both sides of politics that the level playing field is in everyone's best interests. It is becoming impossible to make a decision about what sort of country we want to be, because no one wants to make a decision in favor of morals over trade." He focuses on events at the front line of the dispute, the pickets that stopped the movement of goods off the de-unionised wharves. It was here that the battle took place between what Houghton describes as Australia's most vulnerable laborers - rural workers recruited by the NFF against the blue-collar wharfies. He has sympathy for both sets of workers as pawns in an ever-expanding globalised economy, but certainly thinks the union has right on its side. "Little fish swim in a group," he says. "The only thing blue-collar workers have to sell is their time and their labor. It is only by sticking together that they can deal with what's against them. Their only strength is in numbers." If it is hard to determine who ultimately won the dispute, the rural workers were without doubt the big losers. For Houghton they are scabs, although his research revealed they were driven by a simple economic need: the need to get a job. They came to the coast on the promise of jobs and ended up with nothing when the High Court ordered Patrick to allow the union back on the docks. Their loss is the only simple conclusion to be drawn from the dispute. But Waterfront says even this was due to the success of the union's tactics. "The story had been quickly defined as the workers versus Chris Corrigan, rather than a story about one group of Australian workers against another," it says. Houghton is 31, a dark intense man who speaks quietly and so quickly that at times it is difficult to take in all he is saying. For all his obvious sympathies, he is aware of some of the complexities of his drama's raw material. "The union was portrayed as rorting the system and stealing a TV set from the cafeteria. A 60 Minutes report showed workers covering for others' shifts. It was all supposed to be shock-horror, but I thought there wouldn't be too many of us who wouldn't have done that." Not for him the conclusion reached by Trinca and Davies in Waterfront. "The shift structure that fostered a culture of overtime and inefficiency by providing a financial incentive for unloading slowly had gone from the Patrick docks," they write. "For the wharfies it was a demonstration of the brutal realities of the global economy: that no one is immune from the need to constantly improve and keep pace and that, in future, industrial muscle may need to be exerted on an international scale." Houghton acknowledges the dispute's impact on some of the unionists he met during his research. "Some of them are still hurt by what happened. They have been irrevocably changed by everything that happened and felt it marked the ending of a period in their lives. Some who decided to take the redundancy are still unemployed." He also admits he finds it difficult to have a clear-cut position on all issues in this era of rapid change. "The forces of globalisation cross all political boundaries," he says. "Paul Keating might have been a Labor politician but he was an outspoken advocate of the level playing field at the expense of the workers." Houghton says Keating's blindness to Indonesian tyranny in East Timor was because of the importance he attached to relations with Jakarta. "That's what happens when you put trade ahead of morality." But he is aware of the irony that John Howard - the leader who stood up to the Indonesians over East Timor - was the one who "declared war on an Australian union". This is what makes it so hard to recognise heroes in the modern era. Major-General Peter Cosgrove, who commanded the United Nations force in East Timor, had one great advantage, Houghton says. "He was so obviously the hero taking on the bad guys. But in the waterfront dispute there were people who stayed awake for weeks on the pickets. Some old ladies came down from the suburbs to lend their support after seeing the conflict on television. They are heroes, too." Houghton admits he does not know where he stands in the arguments for and against protectionism. "It used to be the linchpin of the Labor Party and even Jack McEwen was a staunch advocate of protecting rural products for the Country Party in the '60s. I think you have to be prepared to be critical of all governments and concentrate on such standards as their defence of human rights. You can only judge them by their actions." Of course, that assumes governments have any room to move as they face the realities of immediate telecommunications and fast-moving global trade. One of the chief disciples of globalisation, American journalist Thomas Friedman, argues in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree that countries have little option but to put on what he calls "the golden straitjacket". This means a deregulated economy, budget surpluses and free trade. "As your country puts on the Golden Straitjacket, two things tend to happen: your economy grows and your politics shrinks," he writes. "That is why it is increasingly difficult these days to find any real differences between ruling and opposition parties." Houghton has no difficulty with the description. It is just that he desperately wants the Australian Government to have the power to draw a line in the sand against these international forces and preserve parts of the economy the way they used to be. This is what he has done in Front, where the arguments of the little people on the side of the union emerge triumphant. That is a legitimate role of theatre and, given his aversion to rhetorical arguments, there is every likelihood it will make good drama. People need their sense of community reinforced, given the battering it has received from the global revolutions. Even Friedman, globalisation's champion, agrees. "The challenge in this era of globalisation - for countries and individuals - is to find a healthy balance between preserving a sense of identity, home and community and doing what it takes to survive within the globalisation system," he writes. "No one should have any illusions that merely participating in this global economy will make a society healthy. If that participation comes at the price of a country's identity, if individuals feel their olive tree roots crushed, or washed out, by this global system, those olive tree roots will rebel. They will rise up and strangle the process." The 1998 waterfront dispute was an example of such an uprising. By fighting the plans of the government and Patrick, the wharfies and their supporters reaffirmed their faith in a fair go for workers. According to Friedman, this can only strengthen their sense of Australian identity. At the very least, Houghton's drama promises to remind us of some of the necessary ingredients of that identity. Whatever else might be changing, these remain constant. -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
