Unions have a right to express political opinions on global matters. But as the union of opinion-havers, the NTEU should be an exception.
Everyone knows that Monty Python’s Life of Brian is really about the British left in the late 1970s (“Peoples Front of Judaea”/”splitters!”/”What have the Romans ever done for us?”), but few realise that Monty Python and the Holy Grail is about the British left in the early 1970s — and the failure of the wave of strikes at the time to roll on into a revolutionary situation. In the final scene, as Arthur is prancing about, the whole history is turned into cosplay when a cop car roars into the scene and thug Met cops jump out and shut the whole film down, with a hand going over the camera and an “alright, that’s enough”.
That’s pretty much how I feel about the NTEU, sometimes. The tertiary academics union does vital work, under tough conditions, on the very real matter of what sort of lives knowledge workers of a certain type will have: are people going to be offered decent jobs, with security, or is their love of a discipline and scholarship going to be exploited to squeeze every last signifier out of them?
And yet, the political cosplay of ancient battles, in a lethal new environment, never fully goes away. The union’s leadership and active membership are so far to the left that its old guard — accused (unfairly in my view) of complacency and siding with the university establishment — are a mix of ex-Trotskyists and general leftists. Were they to turn up for an SDA election, they’d kinda just be arrested or something, straight away. Their opponents in the recent elections, who have suggested that casual academics are getting a raw serve from the deals made in the COVID period, are a mix of new Trots, leftists and alternative lifestyle enthusiasts.
Read the article by Guy Rundle on Crikey.