Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

In the Boer War intervention. But I had a very close friendship with the local BWIU organiser—someone who I was able to talk to about the job I was in; someone who was able to give me some guidance about occupational health and safety issues in that workplace; someone who was able to talk to me about my rights, as a young man earning adult wages at 15 and labouring on a building site, here at the university which my friend here, the member for Rankin, has just—well, relatively recently, as far as I am concerned!—received his PhD from: working in that workplace was very instructive. It taught me—as if I had not been told by others, including my family—about the importance of joining a union. From then on, throughout my whole working life, I have been and remain a member of the union. I organised as a union representative—I was a shop steward, effectively—in my workplace. I was an elected official in a trade union; not a paid official but an elected representative of my peers. By being in that organisation, I found out how important it is to understand the intrinsic value of organising workers in this country, the role of trade unions, and their historical importance and their validity, not only historically but also today. This bill demonstrates to us the government's disguised and absolute disdain for and abhorrence of unions and their historically critical role in representing Australian workers—

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