The spear was aimed at the Maritime Union of Australia, in the name of improving waterfront productivity. Was the pain worth it? Mark Sawyer examines the evidence.
When John Howard led the Coalition back into government in 1996, his industrial relations minister was Peter Reith. The Victorian was ready. He had been part of the parliamentary team for almost all of the Coalition’s 13-year stretch in opposition, its longest ever. Howard wanted ”to hit the ground running”.
Reith had shown a willingness to take on the toughest, least popular tasks. He had led the Coalition’s campaign against four referendum questions in 1988, the last time Labor tried to effect constitutional change before the upcoming Indigenous Voice referendum. As deputy leader in 1993, he wore some of the flack for the Coalition’s failure in the ”unlosable election”. Now he was ready to crush the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA).
In 1998 Australians awoke to extraordinary televised images of security guards wearing black balaclavas, with German shepherds and rottweilers, securing ports controlled by Patrick Stevedores. Fourteen hundred unionised workers were locked out and contracted employees moved in. It was the beginning of a confrontation that cheered conservatives and broke the hearts of unionists. Arguably it was the last great stand of the old-style, overwhelmingly masculine, brawny Australian union movement.
Suddenly, the waterfront was weaponised. The men running the operation were Patrick chief Chris Corrigan and, on the government side, Reith. The minister’s owl glasses and high forehead made him a favourite of cartoonists, and his face was a front-page feature in the last days of mass-circulation newspapers.
Reith’s family announced his death from Alzheimer’s disease on Tuesday. He was 72. In 2017 he had suffered a stroke while campaigning for the presidency of the Liberal Party. On Wednesday John Howard hailed Reith’s contribution.
His role was a very courageous one. The reason it is remembered is that it brought about profound change. Everybody accepted in the years leading up to the waterfront dispute that the Australian waterfront was inefficient. And as a result of the reforms driven by PR, which naturally had my very strong support and the support of my government, as a result of those reforms, productivity was lifted, and we achieved, in the wake of those reforms, world class productivity levels.
Now of course it was contested. Anything that brings about profound change after generations of static lack of productivity is going to be controversial. Of course the MUA, the union, resisted the change because it challenged their authority. Now they are still a strong union on the waterfront, there’s no argument, but it’s equally no argument that as a result of the changes that were brought about by Peter Reith and others that the productivity of the waterfront changed dramatically for the better. And that was good for the Australian economy, and it was good for Australian farmers who had watched their produce rot on the wharves because of unnecessary stoppages. All of that had to be tackled and at long last the government and the minister, with a lot of help from Chris Corrigan and Patrick Stevedores, we were able to bring about change and we are very proud of that legacy.
We cover the waterfront
Wharfies have played a crucial part in Australia’s history and have their place in progressive folklore. Memories remain of Sydney Harbour’s years as a working port, particularly the Hungry Mile, the lines of men forced to wait at wharves for the call of the bosses. The actions of wharfies blockading Dutch goods in the 1940s were credited with helping Indonesia’s independence movement.
Yet the Maritime Union of Australia would become one of the heavyweights in conservative sights.
In April 1998 Coalition treasurer Peter Costello released two reports by the Productivity Commission into Australia’s waterfront. The reports alleged a range of poor performance indicators. They included:
- container stevedoring charges were higher at all Australian container terminals than at any of the overseas terminals surveyed with the exception of Nagoya in Japan;
- net container crane handlings rates are generally well below those at overseas ports for the same ships;
- average container lifts per terminal employee are significantly lower in Australia;
- the quality of service provided at Australian container terminals is lower than overseas.
Costello said: ”The Commission reports that there are several impediments to improved work arrangements including a workplace characterised by a high level of disputation, substantial union bargaining power, limited competition in the labour market for operational stevedoring employees, and constraints in competition within the industry.”
In Corrigan, the Howard government found a willing ally in its ambitions to revamp the docks, if not bust a union.
Down by the docks in 2022
There were winners and losers on both sides of the dispute. The union went to court and won back its rights to be represented on the waterfront, but many jobs were lost.
Since 1998, the nation has become even more exposed to trade by sea. We send China our coal and they send us our whitegoods. The great Ford, Holden and Mitsubishi factories that soaked up so many postwar migrants have closed forever, so virtually every car we buy arrives on a ship.
In 1998 the unionised workforce was seen as a spanner in the works of the economy. Not much has changed, at least according to business-friendly sources. Australian Financial Review, September 12, 2022:
Nearly a quarter of a century after the 1998 waterfront dispute led to substantial productivity gains at the nation’s ports, the underlying pathology, which is the militant Maritime Union of Australia’s legalised monopoly over the stevedore labour supply, is damaging the economy.
The MUA is still going strong in its sesquicentenary, although its membership is nothing like the 35,000 it enjoyed at its 1960s peak. A merger in 2018 made it a division of the Construction Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union. HERE TO STAY boasts one of the T-shirts in the merchandise section of the union’s website. And what may be a bargain of the year, $5 picks you up a ”20th anniversary Patrick dispute” navy blue T-shirt. But as of Wednesday that website had made no mention of Peter Reith, in life or death.
Patrick is still going too. ”Patrick Terminals operate over four kilometres of quay line with 24 cranes and 130 straddles at four strategically located ports around the Australian coastline,” the company website proclaims. ”Our network of terminals are located in the ports of Brisbane Autostrad, Sydney Autostrad, Melbourne, and Fremantle.”
Corrigan left Patrick in 2006 and continued a business career, which has been documented by MWM. Reith’s final appointment in the Howard ministry was defence minister. He left parliament in 2001 and took on a number of lobbying, media commentary and business positions.
If the Albanese government has grand ambitions for the waterfront, they are yet to have been given much publicity.
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Mark Sawyer is a journalist with extensive experience in print and digital media in Sydney, Melbourne and rural Australia.