‘There is no alternative but to fight’
Greg Combet’s autobiography contains valuable lessons for unions and activists. By Mark Phillips
WHEN Greg Combet announced last June that he was pulling the pin on his career as a Member of Parliament and retiring from political life, it was met with widespread anguish throughout the union movement.
With the Labor Government facing the inevitability of a landslide loss to the Coalition, Mr Combet was viewed by many as the best hope of uniting the progressive side of politics and taking the fight up to Tony Abbott.
His announcement was met with confusion, sadness, and in some cases, anger from people who could not understand why one of the most respected labour leaders of the past quarter of a century was walking away in the hour of greatest need.
In truth, Mr Combet was spent. His passion to carry on the fight, and his intellect, were undimmed. But 25 years of living, breathing and eating his work, fighting battle after battle, had taken its toll on his health.
For his own wellbeing, it was time to move on.
A keen labour historian
It is now well over six months since Greg Combet retired from Parliament following six years as the Member for Charlton in the Hunter Valley, four of them as a senior member of the government during which he introduced a price on carbon emissions; seven years as Secretary of the ACTU; and more than a quarter of a century in the maelstrom of industrial relations and labour politics.
He has a few part-time roles which keep him busy around the country, including chairman of the South Australian government’s Automotive Transformation Taskforce.
He has moved back to Sydney to live.
And he has co-written a book with his former press secretary, Mark Davis, The Fights of My Life, which was officially launched in Sydney on Tuesday, 29 July.
Although a keen student of labour history himself, Mr Combet said he had resisted overtures to write a book while he was in public life, believing it was inappropriate to do so, and has never been the type to keep a diary.
His attitude has always been to look forward to the next task or challenge.
But writing the book has allowed him the time to reflect on the meaning of some of the great fights of his time in the labour movement.
“One of the things I’ve realised over the years is there’s very little of our history written by people who’ve been involved in things and that was a key reason I decided ultimately to do the book,” he says.
“There was a personal element, a cathartic thing to get it out after I’d finished a long period as a union official and a Labor politician but mainly I wanted some of the things I’ve been privileged to be involved in, I want them to be known and recorded and for people to be proud of what they’ve done.”
While Mr Combet naturally has written about his most recent experiences as a senior minister in the last Labor government, he says about three-quarters of the book is about his involvement in the union movement, which dates back to the late-1970s.
He recalls his earliest days when he worked in the underground coal industry while studying to become a mining engineer, at a workers’ health centre run by the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union in Lidcombe, and then at the Waterside Workers Federation under the tutelage of the late Tas Bull, who Mr Combet describes as a personal hero.
From Tas Bull, Mr Combet says learnt “you’ve just got to buckle down and be incredibly tough to win things when you’re fighting for working class people.”
And this is the overarching message that Mr Combet hopes to get across through his book: “nothing is achieved without fighting for it and defending it. And you’ve got to fight for it again and again.”
It is a message that has strong resonance at a time when the union movement is fighting numerous battles to protect jobs, oppose the dismantling of the social wage, defend the minimum wage, penalty rates and other conditions, and even preserve their role as independent representatives of working people.
Mr Combet says he regrets he is no longer able to take a frontline role in these fights, but he wants to help those who do in whatever way he can.
He says the union movement should be very proud of what it has contributed to Australia, but the battle to protect those gains is never-ending.
“It’s very important in our democracy, the labour movement. It is a mass movement of a couple of million people . . . It’s helped shape this country and its values.
“But it doesn’t happen by magic. It’s not sprinkled from above somehow, it’s built by grassroots activism, and around a set of values: fairness, justice, equality of opportunity, democracy, individual and collective rights, all these things are critical to having a decent society.”
Abbott ‘more dangerous than Howard’
Mr Combet has spent many years observing Tony Abbott at close quarters and says the current Prime Minister is potentially more dangerous to working people than John Howard was.
“He’s extremely tough and very intelligent,” he says.
“This is a battle of values and he’s a very tough, seasoned campaigner. He has won the leadership of the country by fighting for it.
“His book’s called Battlelines remember, and he’s on the other side of those lines from the labour movement and he’s a hard fighter, and if you don’t fight him, he’ll win, he will impose his values and his vision on this country.
“And much of that will be antithetical to the interests of ordinary people and there is no alternative but to fight it.”
Mr Combet says he has no doubt that unions must take the fight up to Tony Abbott to protect the labour movement’s vision for Australian society.
“If the labour movement is not fighting and giving people a democratic say and embracing and upholding democratic values, who is?” he says.
While he outlines some ideas for union and Labor Party reform in his book he has little time for those who say unions are no longer relevant or that the ALP should sever all connections with the union movement.
After all, says Greg Combet, unions are still the most powerful organised force for progressive change in our society. And he should know.
This is the first of a two part interview with Greg Combet. Read part two here.
Mark Phillips is editor of Working Life
Published on 28 July 2014.
