Australia’s Secret War by historian Hal Colebatch is the long-suppressed saga of the campaign by the Left to sabotage the Australian war effort in World War II.
The treachery of the largely communist trade union movement led to the deaths and suffering of many Australian and allied servicemen and women.
Colebatch is a unique amalgam of professional historian and former trade union lawyer. Using his connections, he was able to verify each claim with multiple letters and interviews with survivors.
These confirm that between 1939 and 1945 unionists…
- targeted virtually every major Australian warship – including at times its entire cruiser force – with strikes, go slows, sabotage and thefts.
- stole valves out of radios so they couldn’t be used.
- stole food from ration packs.
- sent ships into battle zones without ammunition.
- prevented the rescue of Australian soldiers in Borneo by refusing to load heavy arms.
- broke in half planes sent to supply air cover in New Guinea by signalling cranes to lift them while they were still chained to the deck.
When challenged by troops called in to load ships during strikes, watersiders jeered that they’d sooner lose the war than aid a capitalist victory.
Soldiers responded by vowing to kill the watersiders who had caused so much pain to their countrymen. When the troops got home, the Australian (Labour) government had to order officers to make sure the men dissipated quickly.
The Left’s willingness to wreck a free country at its time of gravest peril beggars belief. And they’re still at it today in New Zealand.
Today’s unions make lofty claims to represent their members, while gouging them for funds to support (and control) the Labour Party – regardless of their members’ political preferences.
They see their job as to dream up and apply ever more costly handbrakes on business in the form of petty, politically correct regulations.
In an age when employers and employees understand the value of communication and cooperation, today’s union movement is as relevant as the wind-up telephone.
Modern businesses invest a great deal of time and money training their staff to be productive. They encourage them to air any concerns. When the bosses don’t get it right, their workers’ rights are well-protected by a vast umbrella of employment laws.
14 acts that protect workers
- Employment Relations Act 2000
- Minimum Wage Act 1983
- Holidays Act 2003
- Wages Protection Act 1983
- Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act 1987
- Equal Pay Act 1972
- Human Rights Act 1993
- New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990
- Health & Safety in Employment Act 1992
- Smoke-free Environments Act 1990
- Accident Compensation Act 2001
- Privacy Act 1993
- Protected Disclosures Act 2000
- KiwiSaver Act 2006
In the 1930s, unions played a useful balancing role because workers had no such laws to protect them. But in the 2010s, they’re not only well-protected, they’re also much better informed.
Today’s workers have more computing power in their smart phones than NASA scientists had to land a man on the moon. If they don’t know their rights, they’re just a Google-search away.
There’s a reason why 85% of private sector workers no longer see the need to belong to a union. That’s because, in the Information Age, bully-boy middlemen only confuse and frustrate. They destroy value for both sides.
Yet despite their growing irrelevance, unions are still taking $150 million a year from members – and using it for acts of economic sabotage.
Like the Australian wharfies in World War II, today’s New Zealand unionists are actively endangering our nation’s security and competitiveness. Remember the Left leading the attack on the GCSB and SIS legislation?
These hypocrites then had the nerve, post-Paris, to demand that the government do more to protect us from terrorism!
More mundane, but no less damaging, are the huge costs being imposed upon the country by massively overblown health and safety regulations.
Talk to any retired building contractor. Ask them how many of their carpenters have ever fallen off a ladder.
I’ve asked a dozen or so. Each had been in the building business for about forty years. None could recall a single such fall.
But that doesn’t stop hordes of eager zealots drafting regulations like the one that makes it a crime for a carpenter to work off a ladder. Single storey houses being built by professional tradesmen must now be fully scaffolded.
This unrequired regulation can add up to $30,000 to the cost of a house, just so its builder won’t have an accident that he’s statistically almost certain not to have.
(He is, however, likely to suffer a lot more back injuries lugging and threading equipment over, under and through scaffolding.)
The Left and their unions then shamelessly attack the government for “unaffordable housing” caused by their unnecessary regulations.
The Clark Labour government hired their extra 29,000 public servants. Has anyone seen any improvement in service? No one I know has.
But all bitterly complain about the higher regulatory costs these battalions of bureaucrats have burdened them with.
To justify jobs they should never have had, these superfluous so-called servants propose more and more pointless regulations, and more and more overzealous inspectors to ensure they’re followed to the letter.
As an example of what that means, take the case of a manager seeking to build a home on a rural block near a provincial city.
He was building on rock – rock so solid that a corner of it was being used as a quarry. It had never slipped, slumped, or been in any way unstable.
No matter. His local council forced him to pay $40,000 to a council-endorsed contractor. What for? For a drilling and geotechnical report that took 80 pages to tell him to dig his foundations 300 mm deep.
It didn’t stop there. The conditions of his building permit required his piles to be dug two metres into solid rock.
And, he had to bell the bottom of the hole.
Think for a minute…
How do you bell out the bottom of a two metre deep post hole in solid rock?
All up, the homeowner estimates these requirements pushed up the cost of his house by over $60,000.
Another example…
A contractor entered a construction site to do a half hour job. Before these highly trained professionals could begin work, each had to hire a “registered consultant” to write protocols on how to open the gate.
Think for a minute…
What is the cost to our country of such time- and money-wasting regulations? It’s a cost built into every roading and other infrastructure project in New Zealand.
A cost paid by you and me.
Just like the Australian wharfies during the War, today’s Left is still looking for ways to sabotage economic development by tying up the movers and shakers.
They have the gall to call themselves “progressives”, and yet never miss a chance to:
- weaken innovators and job creators with petty, exorbitant regulations.
- divide New Zealand by surrendering more and more of its culture and resources (now including its drinking water) to Maori supremacists, forcing New Zealanders to “bribe the tribe” any time they want to get anything done.
- compromise our children’s education by backing teacher union demands that teachers who can’t teach must never be sacked, and teachers who can must not be paid more.
- dumb down and brainwash young New Zealanders by turning state schools and universities into Marxist indoctrination units that have replaced “the best that has been thought and said” with twisted history and pseudo-science, and force students to parrot politically correct lies if they want to graduate.
- waste citizen’s hard-earned money trying to solve a climatic non-problem, in order to siphon wealth from free democracies to socialist dictatorships.
- booby-trap the economy whenever they can see they’re about to lose power (as Labour did with Dr Cullen’s “decade of deficits”).
- endanger New Zealand by urging the importation of believers in a misogynist pre-medieval death cult committed to killing Westerners.
Leftists are as progressive as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is democratic.
What they’re “progressing” is a plan to weaken New Zealand, not to strengthen it.
They see themselves first and foremost not as New Zealanders, but as international socialists. Their goal is the Socialist International goal of creating a United Nations world socialist government.
In the famous words of George Santayana, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.