PSA: Anne Gardiner on Coalition's Royal Commission

Anne Gardiner General Secretary of the Public Service Association NSW

A key theme coming out of the Heydon royal commission is that the Labor Party should distance itself from the union movement.

Some public service colleagues and I think it should be the other way around.

Three years ago these colleagues and I were elected as a new leadership team for the NSW Public Service Union (PSA). We were a mishmash of career public sector workers who felt our union had become a plaything for the ALP and that it had lost sight of members’ needs.

A few of our number belonged to political parties including the Greens, Shooters and Fishers, Socialist Alliance and the ALP.

But the majority of the public sector workers on our election ticket had no political affiliation — and we’re proud of it. In fact one of our successful candidates stated in election material that members should vote for him because he was a committed Christian.

Our election campaign was totally self-funded through trivia nights, chocolate sales and member donations. We didn’t ask for and didn’t want political donations.

We were elected because the members decided that they wanted greater transparency and accountability in their union and less focus on the political aspirations of career union officials.

It didn’t take a multimillion-dollar royal commission in order for our members to achieve this. They used their vote to do it.

One of the first things our newly elected union leadership did was to ban all political donations and to ensure union resources would not be used to support any political parties or candidates.

It isn’t easy to bring about significant internal change in a union. This is particularly so in our union, where members’ jobs are under a privatisation cloud and resources are spread very thin.

However, creating onerous government regulatory regimes to oversee unions isn’t the answer if the aim is to democratise unions. The key to the answer is in the word “democracy”.

Expensive government regulation hasn’t created the desired transparency and accountability in the banking sector. There is no reason to expect it will achieve it in the union movement.

This is a change that must be demanded by the members.

Union members were already demanding more formal oversight arrangements in their unions before the Heydon royal commission was conceived.

Corrupt union officials had already been outed by the members and systemically flawed unions had been suspended by the ACTU.

There is no doubt that a lot more needs to be done, but unions, like many other not-for-profits, have significantly improved their internal systems over the last five years.

Let’s not demonise unions and their members.

It’s important that workers have proper representation that is focused on their needs.

There has never been a time in my memory when workers needed a union more.