Piers Akerman
The Sunday Telegraph
January 25,2014
AS a backdrop to today's Australia Day celebrations, the Labor/Green Left is working itself into a lather over plans to review the flawed national education curriculum.
The review is most timely and it behoves Australians to pause to remember that the awful campaign being waged by powerful trade unions during World War II had prevailed, it is unlikely we would have had anything to celebrate today.
Naturally, the current nat-ional curriculum crafted by Left-leaning academics says nothing about the appalling actions taken by individual unions, their leaders, the ACTU and members of Labor's leadership to sabotage Australia's war effort.
In a hard-hitting Australia Day eve address to members of the Young Liberals, Employment Minister Eric Abetz, the leader of the government in the Senate, reminded his audience of this extraordinary chapter in Australian history - a chapter which Labor cannot bring itself to address.
Fittingly, Senator Abetz was speaking in the port city of Fremantle, the scene of a number of the unconscionable actions taken to undermine the war against Axis nations.
Just as former Prime Minister Paul Keating has attempted to rewrite history with his recent fallacious account of Australia's engagement in World War I, so too, have Labor historians attempted to airbrush from our history the efforts of the trade union movement and the ALP to incapacitate Australian forces during World War II.
Fortunately, West Australian scholar, poet and author Hal Colebatch has published a painstakingly researched, fully documented account of the treachery in a book Australia's Secret War. Quoting from the book, Senator Abetz said: "(a) systematic campaign of sabotage criss-crossed the nation, from Townsville to Fremantle, and cost the lives of countless Australian Diggers and allied soldiers."
My late uncle (Z Forces) witnessed supplies and planes and weapons deliberately dumped into the water at Townsville by ACTU members during WW2.
The actions of the trade unionists involved included deliberately damaging planes, removing valves from radio transmitters that made them inoperative, which in turn led to an inability to provide safe direction to a squadron of US planes and their crewmen, all of whom were lost.
Coalminers and munition factory workers went on strike, prejudicing the war effort, costing lives, all leading to unnecessary loss and increasing the length and cost of the war.
Senator Abetz continued: "Australian women were needlessly widowed. Australian children were needlessly left fatherless."
He said the deliberate acts of union bastardry which led to people being killed and injured, and the war effort being severely compromised, were acts of murder, grievous bodily harm and treason, all of which can be sheeted home to the union movement and all of which have been largely ignored. He believes the unions involved, their successors and the ACTU should provide a national apology for prejudicing the nation's war effort, remembering those families who needlessly lost loved ones because of their members' treasonous activities.
This ugly period in Labor's history came perilously close to the surface when the Howard government took on the Maritime Union and demonstrated how specious its arguments on loading rates were.
Now the MUA and the Electrical Trade Union have donated to a war chest set up to defend bikie gang members caught up by Queensland Premier Campbell Newman's tough new anti-organised crime laws.
According to reports, the MUA has donated $5000 and the ETU has tossed in $10,000, peanuts to these multimillion dollar operations, but no doubt welcomed by the bikies. Since 2000, the MUA and ETU contributed $1 million and $3.5 million respectively to the ALP.
Senator Abetz said then that unions engaging or financially assisting bikie gangs would be judged on such linkages and that the Labor party needed to disassociate itself from these unions.
"Mr Shorten must refuse to accept any further donations from any affiliated union that is also providing support to bikie gangs. Anything less would be a complete abandonment of leadership by him," Senator Abetz said. "Individual union members are fed up with union bosses unilaterally spending their hard-earned money in more-than-questionable causes, be it at the Health Services Union, the CFMEU, the MUA or the ETU."
It would seem that while the Labor movement is losing its attempt to keep its foul wartime record a dark secret, it is unable to keep the lid on the activities of its current backers.
As a former national union leader, Bill Shorten has to clearly distance Labor from the shameful actions of the past and the discreditable activities of more recent members.
He should also deliver the long overdue national apology, well in time for next year's Australia Day celebration.
