'Do you believe in the rule of law?' seems an innocuous question. But if someone must ask — when there is only one correct answer — we can take it as a trap.
The new ACTU secretary was asked this question on ABC 7.30. To her credit, Sally McManus didn't blink. 'I believe in the rule of law where the law is fair, when the law is right,' she said to host, Leigh Sales. 'But when it's unjust, I don't think there's a problem with breaking it.' Predictably, a new round of anti-union chest-thumping is underway.
If any other person had said this in the context of civil and political rights, it might not be so incendiary. Many leaders have uttered versions of it throughout history.
Laws are not as neutral as we imagine them to be. They can't be — they are constructed by individuals of immense power, with their own set of values and connections. The Coalition government, hostile to unions, have pursued anti-union laws.
There is not enough space here to list other injustices that have been secured through legislation. Perhaps it is enough to remember that the rule of law is often invoked by those who benefit from the status quo. The more unfair the status quo, the more vehement the invocation.
Labor leader and former AWU secretary Bill Shorten played it safe in his response to McManus' remarks. 'I just don't agree,' he said. 'If you don't like a law, if you think a law is unjust, use the democratic process to get it changed. That's the great thing about living in a country like Australia. That's what democracy is about. We believe in changing bad laws, not breaking them.'
For all the tepid verbosity, it does not offer much to chippies who have decided to stop work over a safety breach that has claimed the life of their mate. Under a hostile government, those same democratic processes facilitate anti-worker policies. This means that remedies cannot be limited to parliament. In any case, withholding labour can hardly be characterised as un-democratic.
McManus wasn't referring to laws that involve harm to persons or property, but unprotected industrial action. That doesn't make union members criminals, though that is the association that anti-union politicians and pundits want to make.
"The concept of permission is simple but critical because it exposes dynamics of power. It relies to some degree, paradoxically, on the cooperation of the employer,