Pod Insights ABC Rewind 04 | Conspiracy | Who Let the Dogs Out About this episode The Maritime Union knows Patrick Stevedores is building up to a dramatic move. But it’s shocked when the company sends in balaclava-clad security guards and dogs to forcibly lock out workers in the dark of night. The union's lawyers take the company to the Federal Court where Patrick drops a bombshell on day one of the hearing.
Transcript 6,267 words · 38 speakers
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0:07 Speaker 01 A warning that this episode of Rewind contains strong language.
0:15 Speaker 02 It's April 7th, 1998. A Tuesday. It's late, after 8pm. And Sydney Morning Herald photographer Dean Soares having a quiet night at his folks' house in the portside Sydney suburb of Botany. Suddenly, he gets a call.
0:33 Speaker 03 It was an odd call. They didn't normally ring your parents' place.
0:36 Speaker 02 It's his editor, on shift at the paper's headquarters in Sussex Street.
0:40 Speaker 03 And he said, "Can you start tomorrow morning down at Port Botany? We believe there's going to be some sort of industrial action."
0:46 Speaker 02 Dean says, "Sure, I'll head down early." But he's got that feeling in his gut that something's brewing.
0:54 Speaker 03 So I thought, "I'll take a drive down and see if there's anything stirring." So I got down to Port Botany. I drove straight up to the front gates. And a guy come running over to me, and he was a wharfie. He was going, "Get in there, get in there", gesticulating away. Like, "Go, go, go." I said, "Go for what?" He said, "They're coming on boats." I said, "Who are?" He said, "Yeah, security, they're coming. Get down there." So I jumped in the car. I raced down the berth, and it's really eerie sort of feeling. It was dead silent, but there wasn't any sign of movement.
1:22 Speaker 02 Dean grew up right next to the wharfs, so he knows them like the back of his hand. But tonight, mm, something's off.
1:31 Speaker 03 Normally, if you're on a port at night time, there's lights and cars driving around, and forklifts and trucks and all that sort of business. And I couldn't even see a body anywhere. It wasn't really till I got to the end of the berth that you could see this commotion going on. You know, guys in white shirts and black pants jumping off the boats.
1:49 Speaker 02 Dean doesn't realise it at the time, but what he's seeing that night, it'll become the defining image of the 1998 waterfront dispute.
1:58 Speaker 03 And so as they walked up to me, they were yelling abuse and screaming at me. And I was just going bang, bang, bang, firing off flushers at them. They'd taunt with the dog and sort of run a bit at me type thing. And I just jumped in the car, drive 100 metres up the road, and just shooting them up until the point where I knew I had to get in the car before they get their hands on me.
2:17 Speaker 02 This happens all the way back to the front gates. A game of cat and mouse. Dean getting as many shots as he can.
2:26 Speaker 03 I just got out, like literally they were 20 metres running behind me as I was got my car out of there.
2:33 Speaker 02 Dean Saul has followed his photojournalist nose and landed one of the biggest scoops of the century. The night Patrick Stevedores had security guards in balaclavas with guard dogs, raid wolves all over Australia and lock out its union workers.
2:52 Speaker 04 I was about to try to catch some sleep and Jim Tannock from our national office rang up. He just said, "Cole, it's on." At 11pm, I called them goons with their dogs, stormed all the wharves and drove people out of the wharf, out of messrooms, out of machines, out of straddles. Oh, it was terrible stuff, terrible stuff.
3:18 Speaker 02 Cole Davies is the Maritime Union's Joint Branch Secretary in Brisbane. He doesn't know it yet, but the same thing is happening at wharves around the country. Fremantle, Darling Harbour, East Swanson, Port Botany.
3:32 Speaker 03 Bearing witness to this historical event unfolding before my eyes, I thought, "Well, this is it, it's on."
3:38 Speaker 02 As security guards move onto the docks, phones start ringing across the country. Workers jump out of their beds and race down to the docks. And so do the journalists, including Anne Davies from the Sydney Morning Herald.
3:53 Speaker 05 Wharfs locked themselves in the straddle cranes. Now, straddle cranes are gigantic. They're big enough to sit over the three containers piled up. And they were running these cranes down the aisles, chasing the security guards. You know, the photos were dramatic. The descriptions from people were so scary, you know, like it's a miracle someone didn't get killed.
4:18 Speaker 04 And the men who had just been on the shift, I'll never forget, they were standing around, absolutely bewildered at what had just taken place.
4:26 Speaker 02 Cole Davies hightails it down to the Brisbane docks.
4:30 Speaker 04 I can remember going into the terminal saying, "Listen, there could be blokes stuck in the messroom and all that sort of business. And these two big rotwheels, they're trying to chew my arse, are you?" And I said, "You don't move them bleeping dogs, I'll kick them." And the bloke just said to me, "You kick that dog, mate, it'll kill you."
4:56 Speaker 02 I'm Jan Fran and this is Conspiracy: War on the Waterfront. Episode four, Who Let the Dogs Out?
5:06 Speaker 02 On the last episode Dubai's gone bust and Patrick Stevedores has moved on to Plan B, teaming up with the National Farmers' Federation to train a new workforce on WebDoc in Melbourne. It's not going great.
5:20 Speaker 06 And then the rocks or the stones or the bricks or whatever it is, it's kind of they start thudding on the outside of the bus and the windows and you hear windows smashing every now and then.
5:29 Speaker 02 Young lawyer Josh Bornstein's watching all this play out on his telly.
5:33 Speaker 07 I knew something was brewing that was big and I couldn't see what the union was doing to respond. I couldn't understand what their strategy was.
5:40 Speaker 02 He and his legal team alleged an unlawful conspiracy between Patrick's and the NFF to sack the wharfies.
5:48 Speaker 08 Well, we heard from management and instructors that over the Easter period, the wharfies will downtime for the holidays and that's when the strikebreakers are going to move in and take over Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Fremantle.
6:01 Speaker 02 And sure enough, after months and months of tension, it's happened. The gloves are off. Every single worker from every single Patrick's dock in Australia has been fired.
6:18 Speaker 09 You know, you're removing people who believed that they owned that site. Those people believed that they were there for life, you know, they weren't going to go voluntarily.
6:30 Speaker 02 Chris Corrigan's the managing director of Patrick's Stevedores and the mastermind behind the lockout.
6:36 Speaker 09 I mean, let's call a spade a spade, you know, there was no way. If I'd gone along and asked them, please, would you mind moving on? I mean, there's no chance, but at the end of the day, we had to get a result. We had the right to get a result. We did nothing illegal. We simply removed people from the site who had no right to, any longer right to be there.
6:59 Speaker 02 The MUA had been expecting something to go down this weekend, at Easter. But Patrick's has gone early, firing its union workers and bringing in non-union labour.
7:16 Speaker 10 It was almost like a bomb had gone off, because it was hitting the news that the Wharfies had been locked out.
7:22 Speaker 02 This is James. No, it's not his real name. And yes, his voice has been changed. You'll see why in a second.
7:29 Speaker 10 And we were to go in and break them, to do the job. And I thought, well, that's not quite what we actually expected to happen. And it got quite ugly soon after.
7:38 Speaker 02 These non-union workers, like James, well, they become the bad guys in this dispute, the so-called scabs.
7:47 Speaker 10 I felt pretty peeved that we were given a misleading statement to get us into that situation. We expected to be providing competition, be working virtually alongside these guys. Didn't think that we were going to go in as a, it's almost like an invasion of the Russians.
8:02 Speaker 02 When he's called in that night, James is told to go to a secret location. And when he gets there, there's a bus waiting, and it drives all the replacement workers down to the dock. Remember the tension in episode three, when the NFF workers descended onto Web Dock? That was nothing compared to this.
8:23 Speaker 10 When we got there, the gates were shut, the police were in attendance, there was Wharfies close by, screaming abuse and going on. We were taken in a back gate, and we got in, we're told not to touch water cans or water bottles around the place, because the Wharfies had done things to the water that would make it poisonous. Now, I don't know whether it was true or not, even some such that they pissed in the water tanks. Because what the level of animosity was, or they've taken keys out of cranes, they've taken keys out of forklifts and thrown them away. So they've actually made the place really inhospitable to work in to start up work. And I could understand why they had taken such a response, because they'd lost their jobs and we'd taken over.
9:02 Speaker 02 As the word spreads, union officials like Glen Wood also make their way to the docks.
9:08 Speaker 11 When I got down there, the gates had been locked. There was a lot of people down there from the community around Miller's Point. And we just stood out the front. All night, people had come to the pickup, wanted to get into the terminal, so they started rapping the gates. I was doing it too. I'm on screen for doing it. We were told by John, John Coombs, that we weren't to get involved in any fights or anything like that. Pretty hard to stop young folks when they can see their job going out the door.
9:45 Speaker 12 On the other side of the mesh fence, a far less forthcoming group of workers, the newly landed security guards. Can we ask who you work for? I'm not allowed to make a comment, mate. I have to get in touch with Patrick's management. You've been told to secure the premises? I've been told. What about the work?
10:00 Speaker 13 Let's not forget how they removed the workforce. They didn't give them termination notice and redundancy pay. They moved in with dogs and balaclavas. I mean, this is where they overplayed their hand.
10:12 Speaker 02 The MUA's National Secretary, John Coombs, is fuming.
10:16 Speaker 13 But is that the normal way in this country to remove a workforce and you want to replace them? Come on. I mean, is that acceptable?
10:26 Speaker 02 At the same time, security guards are locking down the walls. Ian Hankey, Press Secretary to the Minister for Workplace Relations, Peter Reith, drops a press release into media mailboxes at Parliament House.
10:38 Speaker 14 We only heard about the actual lockout around about 8 or 9 o'clock or something like that. And we actually put a time on it when the release went out, which we wouldn't normally do, at 11pm. And that was to indicate that that's when we knew, that's why the release went out then.
10:56 Speaker 02 And what exactly did that press release say?
11:00 Speaker 14 Oh, basically, we support reform of the waterfront, we've got a redundancy programme, something, you know. It was only about half a dozen lines, as I recall.
11:08 Speaker 02 Ian then rings the bells that signal to the journalists that big news is dropping. And, no, it wasn't a literal bell, sadly. More like a buzzer. Peter Reith then holds a late-night media conference supporting Patrick's Devidores.
11:24 Speaker 15 This is a decisive turning point in the history of reform on the Australian waterfront and gives Australia the opportunity to have a waterfront which will allow us to compete.
11:35 Speaker 02 The timing of this becomes kind of controversial. Sydney Morning Herald journalist Anne Davies is closely following the night's events.
11:45 Speaker 05 The union had been working on the idea that there was this vast conspiracy between the government, Corrigan, the farmers. And the press release came out from Peter Reith with precision timing. And then they learnt there was going to be government-funded redundancies. Well, you know, anyone who's had anything to do with government knows they don't find a pot of money overnight. There has to be a cabinet process or at least some sort of process to find the money.
12:14 Speaker 02 And cabinet records do show the redundancies were discussed months earlier.
12:21 Speaker 16 So just to get this clear, on April 7th, that night, had he warned you in advance this was going to happen? Had he told you?
12:27 Speaker 15 No, no, I don't think, no. My memory of it is I had no... He didn't ring me up and say this is what's going to happen, no.
12:34 Speaker 02 This is the late Peter Reith, and he's speaking with the ABC's Fran Kelly about how much Patrick's MD, Chris Corrigan, had told him.
12:42 Speaker 16 So on April 7th, were you expecting...
12:44 Speaker 15 But I want to make it very clear, though. I mean, a blind Freddie could say that it was all going to come to a head. I mean, let's not look back on it and say, oh, what a shock, surprise, horror this was. I mean, the fact of the matter is, there were a lot of the Wharfies, they were waiting for it. I mean, they were waiting with their hands out for the redundancy package.
13:04 Speaker 02 Hmm, not too sure about that.
13:07 Speaker 15 My memory of it is I didn't even know until right at the moment, basically. Literally at the moment. I don't, I can't even remember what time of the day it was.
13:17 Speaker 16 I think it was about 8 o'clock at night or something, isn't it?
13:19 Speaker 15 It might have been at night, but I just don't, I don't... Yeah, I just don't remember exactly.
13:25 Speaker 02 It does seem like an odd thing to forget on such a critical night. And also, we did a little digging and found an old cassette tape of former Queensland Premier, Rob Borbridge, speaking to journalist Helen Trinker. Borbridge says Reith called him earlier on the day of the lockout, warning him something was about to happen. He was on his way to a meeting in Gimpy and had pulled over for a Big Mac when he got the call.
13:52 Speaker 17 I had one conversation with Peter Reith, which was to alert me that the situation may be about to escalate dramatically. Right. I was driving up to Gimpin. We'd stopped at McDonald's in Gimpia, had a Big Mac. We were just pulling in and the phone rang and it was pretty re alerting me that there was a possibility that the situation could escalate within the next few hours.
14:20 Speaker 02 So if Reeve didn't know what was about to go down, what's he warning Premiers about? It does help explain why his Labor counterpart, Bob McMullin, isn't buying Reeve's line.
14:33 Speaker 18 The government's always been conspiring with Patrick's to ensure that a thousand Australians got sacked. It just reveals what the government's strategy has been all along. Dubai and all those other events fall into place.
14:47 Speaker 02 And then, there are those redundancies the government's been working on for months.
14:52 Speaker 15 Our scheme will ensure firstly that these wharfies receive their full entitlements. And you can imagine with the wharfies, they've dealt themselves a pretty generous hand, up to $270,000 each, including superannuation.
15:04 Speaker 19 They expect that workers will pick up their miserable redundancy package in lieu of their jobs, their union membership and their award coverage. They're going to be sadly mistaken and so the waterfront will grind to a halt.
15:15 Speaker 20 There are plenty of people out there who are willing to help us re-establish our business and who are willing to do a fair day's work for a fair day's pay.
15:23 Speaker 02 But the battle for the waterfront is about to enter two new fronts. The court of law and the court of public opinion. And it looks like it's round one to the union as the news breaks the morning after the lockout.
15:39 Speaker 21 I'm appalled at the action by the government this morning. Appalled.
15:43 Speaker 22 To me, are we really becoming like a military dictatorship here? I'm not in a union, I'm nothing connected with it. But I woke up this morning and when I heard this on the news, I thought, what country am I in?
15:57 Speaker 23 Putting dogs and men in balakavas on the wharves and locking out the workers was the most stupid strategy.
16:08 Speaker 02 This is Mary Stewart. At the time of the dispute, she worked at the ACTU, the peak union body.
16:14 Speaker 23 And it was like a gift because communities didn't like it. Church groups didn't like it. Mothers' clubs didn't like it.
16:22 Speaker 02 Not that Chris Corrigan cares much about that.
16:25 Speaker 09 The latte set, as I call them, the people who sip their lounge chairs and sip their lattes, those people were all tut-tutting, you know, tut-tut-tut-tut, this isn't nice. Well, sometimes, to achieve change, you can't always be nice. But they weren't wearing balaclavas because I asked them to. I asked them not to. They were wearing balaclavas because they feared for their own lives.
16:53 Speaker 02 The balaclavas and the dogs, it's all anyone can talk about. And it's making life very difficult for Mark Textor, who's been brought in to manage the government's PR.
17:03 Speaker 24 The balaclavas and the dogs, it's just too silly. It's juvenile. And I thought they were very damaging images. They almost collapsed the campaign in relation to waterfront reform because they were all about conflict. They weren't about a set of economic messages about the impact on Australia and Australians of having inefficient wars.
17:26 Speaker 02 But in hindsight, would Chris Corrigan handle that night any differently?
17:31 Speaker 09 I'd certainly try to think of a better way, but we induced them to leave without a slight injury. Was their morale dented? Absolutely. But we did it in the nicest possible way that we could. So, did we lose the optics? Sure, we lost the optics. I can't disagree with that. But at the end of the day, sometimes things have to happen with a bit of force.
18:01 Speaker 02 The day before the lockout, Wednesday, April 6, the MUA had lodged an application in the federal court for a court order to stop Patrick's firing its workers. It knew a mass sacking was coming, and this order was supposed to be a preemptive strike. But the lockout changed everything. Here's Josh Bornstein.
18:22 Speaker 07 I was woken up by a phone call in the middle of the night, and it was Kombay on the phone. He said, "There's mayhem on the docks. It's all on." He put the phone down and I thought, what do I do now? It's 1am and the next morning we were in court.
18:42 Speaker 02 The union's lawyers, the B team, Bornstein, Borenstein and Burnside, arrive at the federal court first thing the morning after the lockout.
18:50 Speaker 07 There was obviously huge tension and then there was a shock.
18:54 Speaker 02 Before the hearings even started, Patrick's legal team drops a bomb.
19:00 Speaker 07 The QC for Patrick's, John Middleton, linked over to our QC, Julian Burnside, and said, by the way, we've been put into administration.
19:12 Speaker 02 Wait, what?
19:13 Speaker 05 I mean, they looked, I remember the sort of buzz that went around the court. And the union just went, you could see them go white. I mean, they were just shocked. Suddenly they realised that they were working for shells. They were working for shell companies with no assets. And so trying to get their jobs back was just infinitely harder.
19:38 Speaker 02 Journalist Anne Davies is in the courtroom and she's trying to make sense of the complex restructuring of Patrick Stevedore's that, it argues, makes it legal to fire its workers.
19:51 Speaker 05 Restructuring had led to all the valuable assets in Chris Corrigan's group being taken further up the corporate chain. But the companies that employed the workers had nothing. In fact, they owed banks millions of dollars.
20:07 Speaker 02 This is a huge problem for the union. Patrick's lawyers argue you can't legally force a company that has no money to keep on its workers. But the union's lawyers say that backroom restructuring of Patrick's is all part of the conspiracy to sack workers because they're members of the union.
20:28 Speaker 25 Well, I'm Tony North. At the time of the Dochs dispute, I was a judge of the federal court.
20:35 Speaker 02 Justice North is the duty judge randomly rosted on to hear urgent matters. And this administration bombshell? Well, it's put him off right from the start. Just to be clear, Patrick's manoeuvre is completely legal, but...
20:53 Speaker 25 It was so blatantly a clever lawyer's ruse which got them nowhere.
21:02 Speaker 25 To this particular judge, it actually backfired. When circumstances smell, judges of all political persuasions get the cent.
21:15 Speaker 02 And after a day of legal arguments, where the union lays out its case for a conspiracy, Justice North orders a temporary halt to the sacking of the union workers. Says he'll hear the full case after Easter. Here's Josh Bornstein.
21:30 Speaker 07 So that was crucial for us, but it didn't get them back in the gates, which meant over that Easter, the non-union workers were working on the docks.
21:42 Speaker 26 Leading this bulletin tonight, a reprieve for more than 2,000 Patrick Stevedore workers as a court injunction stops their immediate sacking. The Maritime Union is claiming a major victory after the federal court grabs an injunction...
21:56 Speaker 02 Well, it's a victory of sorts. Justice North's orders mean the Wharfies still have jobs, in theory. In practice, Patrick's keeps them off the docks and out of work, and brings in the non-union PCS workforce. But the company can't keep the union workers, or their supporters, away from the docks. The picket lines grow.
22:23 Speaker 27 So my name's Natalie Hutchins, formerly Natalie Sykes. And when I was part of the dispute, I was the first woman elected to the role of Assistant Secretary at the Victorian Trades Hall at the age of 24.
22:37 Speaker 02 Natalie's now a minister in the Victorian Government. She's also got serious union pedigree. Her great-great-grandfather was one of the founders of the precursor to the MUA, the Waterside Workers' Federation. And both her great-grandfather and grandfather, they worked on the Wharves too.
22:56 Speaker 27 On a Sunday, if we did not have a roast with all the family, that's because someone in the family was on strike and we had soup instead. So that's when we knew there was industrial action by what we got on a Sunday.
23:09 Speaker 02 Natalie's got a huge job, negotiating with the Victorian Police on behalf of Trades Hall, the headquarters of the state's labour movement. And she's got to keep angry and upset workers calm.
23:25 Speaker 02 They're calling it a peaceful assembly. And thousands join in over this Easter weekend, right across the country. It's a huge operation.
23:34 Speaker 27 The rollout of equipment, power generators, food. It was just quite phenomenal that a mini-city was built within a week.
23:43 Speaker 02 The picketers have to think strategically. Map and block all the potential entry points to keep the trucks out of the docks.
23:51 Speaker 27 And we realised that we didn't have the train line covered. And that morning, two really elderly women had come down to offer their support. And they came down with their little fold-up seats and their knitting. And so whilst we were fluffing around trying to figure out what we're going to do and how we're going to barricade it, these two women just picked up their chairs, put them on the train line and just continued knitting and talking while this train was burling down the tracks towards them. And I was completely losing my mind. And the train just stopped and the driver got out and said, "You people, you have no morals. How could you do this? How could you put these elderly women on the train?" And they were having a little bit of a giggle and they were refusing to move.
24:36 Speaker 27 So the train backed up. But it became a real battle throughout the weeks to stop that train going in.
24:44 Speaker 02 It's like a carnival down at the docks. There's food trucks, creches, entertainment. And it's not just the wharfies digging in. It's all their supporters, their families, other unions. It becomes one of the strongest displays of civil disobedience in Australian history.
25:06 Speaker 28 It was so massive. And the union activists, everyone shouting, "Scab, scab", and my daughters, two daughters, they were very, very young. And they asked me, "Dad, what does scab means?" And it was a kind of educational process for us. It was a great time.
25:25 Speaker 27 The site around Webb Dock and Appleton Dock was just like Mad Max had come to town. There was all these structures that had been put up. There was fires in pits that had been set up and a tent city that was setting up. We had this huge kitchen that was run by a group called the Dish Pigs. And it was a bit Mad Max-ish.
25:48 Speaker 02 Talk me through how the picket is landing with the wider public. Do people care?
25:52 Speaker 29 People care so much. So the pickets are getting bigger and bigger the longer the dispute goes.
25:58 Speaker 02 This is historian Dr Geraldine Feller.
26:01 Speaker 29 And the reason is, everyone's thinking, could this happen to me? You know, could I be next? Could I be thrown out of my workplace by security guards with balaclavas and dogs? So they're getting down to the wharves, they're showing their support for the wharffies. People, I think, often think that a dispute like this, it must have been all like blokes and ACDC. There's plenty of blokes and ACDC. But there was nurses down there every day. Huge delegations from the teachers' unions would go down there. This incredibly diverse cross-section of society down there, supporting the wharffies. And I know people, like, I've got plenty of friends my age, whose parents took them down there. This was a family affair in a lot of ways, because people felt like it could affect them. It could affect their family.
26:52 Speaker 03 We were so embedded in, down in Botany, that like, I was spending 20 hours a day down there, seven days a week.
26:59 Speaker 02 Photographer Dean Saul doesn't want to miss a scoop. So he's practically living at the docks, along with a bunch of others.
27:06 Speaker 03 And at night time, it was a fun place to be, it was a social hub. They'd have a driving range there, they'll smack off golf balls into the security or late in the night. This is like when the media are all gone, home. And, yeah, there'd be huge rock fights and pelting each other with half bricks and stuff. The security guards and the shenanigans that happened in late at night were kind of interesting and fun. And largely undocumented, if these guys were up all night. They saw this as an existential threat, so they weren't going to bed.
27:38 Speaker 28 It was jubilant. It gives you a shiver in the backbone to do, you know, you feel so many people sitting down in the ground and holding arm to arm and also not to be intimidated by the police. And it gives you goosebumps. You see all this power, this people power fighting back. And it was amazing. It was amazing experience.
28:05 Speaker 02 Everyone we've talked to who's spent time at the picket line says the same thing. You could almost hear their spirits lift when they reflect. But underneath this powerful sense of community is a stark reality. That day of the lockout, 1,400 people lost their jobs, their income, their security. Many had only ever known working on the dogs. It's their whole world. As long as their jobs are in limbo, this is what they're fighting for.
28:40 Speaker 30 There's two buses of scabs coming out.
28:43 Speaker 02 But it's really a tale of two picket lines.
28:47 Speaker 30 Let's all line up and give them appropriate goodbye.
28:52 Speaker 02 For the alternative workforce crossing them, it's not all family fun and food stalls.
28:59 Speaker 06 We've had windows smashed. Firing ball bearings at us. And one of them had a pretty good slingshot. It would actually go nearly all the way through a truck door. When you see an image of yourself on a placard and pig's blood splattered all over it and big black letters below it, we know where you live. And this ball bearing hit the window, bounced off and hit one of the coppers fair in the back of the head. It dropped him like a rock. He was out cold. Dave would smash our trucks with boards off pallets, bricks. Had some people got through those picket lines and passed those dogs and guards, there would have been a lot of blood.
29:34 Speaker 09 We had threats constantly. My wife took a number of calls which were extraordinarily violent. We had security guards that went with us everywhere.
29:48 Speaker 02 It's not a walk in the park for Patrick's MD, Chris Corrigan, either.
29:53 Speaker 09 The children had to be driven to school in a different direction every day. They had security guards looking after them. Our neighbours' houses were attacked with shocking graffiti. Death to scabs and other things that I don't wish to put on your programme, but they were, you know, violent.
30:13 Speaker 09 Attacks of many, of many sorts like that.
30:16 Speaker 02 But, union organizer Natalie Hutchins sees it differently.
30:20 Speaker 27 In Victoria, I was really proud of the fact that we didn't have any violence. I didn't see any violence in the time that I was down there. There was lots of heated tension and fiery conversations and people frustrated. And I saw resistance to police wanting to enter or buses and minivans coming in and people hurling abuse but not being physically violent.
30:46 Speaker 09 Are you, did you, have you seen pictures of it? They were smashing the windows of buses, people being bussed in there. They were screaming and yelling abuse. I mean, it was absolute violence, absolute violence. That's why we had to recruit people who weren't wilting violence. You, you, you had to recruit people who were willing to stand up and who believed they were on a mission. And that's what we did and that's what we succeeded in doing.
31:13 Speaker 02 Suffice to say, there's dirty tricks on both sides. At one stage, the Wharfies smuggle Sydney Morning Herald photographer Dean Sewell across the picket line. They've heard the non-union workers have trashed their locker rooms and they want proof.
31:30 Speaker 03 I mean, these guys actually smuggled me into the port when it was under occupation, if you like. A guy picks me up and he says, "Now, if anyone calls out to you, run." So he took me into the locker room and I photographed all this graffiti and stuff, putrid sort of infantile graffiti about anti-MUA and stuff. They'd smash things up and garbage and rubbish and shat in places and pretty foul and terrible. So we were walking back out and some guy yells, "Hey!" He points up and he's screaming at me going, "Hey, you! Who are you? Get, yeah, like, come down here!" So I was bolting as like MacGyver, you know, like my camera and ducking through halls. And the rest of the media were watching me going, "What's going on here?"
32:14 Speaker 31 Worf is preventing cargo leaving Patrick's Port Botany terminal. They've been successful so far this morning with one truck turning away immediately after arriving.
32:22 Speaker 23 Because no goods could get out. The Worf was not working.
32:26 Speaker 02 This is the ACTU's Mary Stewart.
32:29 Speaker 23 So Corrigan was financially being penalised every day that we held that picket line. And we believed eventually we might lose it, you know, they might break the picket.
32:40 Speaker 32 Over 100 members of the Maritime Union along with tugboat and ferry operators have gathered outside two gates at Darling Harbour. They're expecting trucks at the Worf around nine o'clock and say they'll lie and sit across the gate to stop them entering.
32:55 Speaker 02 The pickets are working. Not much is getting through, in or out. The banks are on Chris Corrigan's back. Everyone wants a piece of him, the media and the picketers.
33:09 Speaker 09 I was driven around in the back of a armour clad laundry van for disguise. The only problem with that was it didn't have any air conditioning. You'd get out of a studio to do a TV interview and you'd be perspiring quite excessively. But I used to go down in the back of the laundry van and look at the pickets and I kept a, you know, a pretty good eye on what was going on. I had visibility out of the van, but I had to live in a secret location. None of that's pleasant. I mean, you don't do that for kicks. I mean, you do it because you believe there's some purpose to what you're doing.
33:52 Speaker 09 But it was an extraordinarily difficult period for probably at least 12 months.
33:57 Speaker 02 Well, I'll give it to Corrigan. The man has gumption. And he's going to need it to stare down this particular critic.
34:04 Speaker 25 This morning, the story of how the bitter divisions are pitting brother against brother in Chris Corrigan's own family. We didn't quite see things the same way.
34:13 Speaker 02 This is Derek Corrigan.
34:16 Speaker 33 And he is really not liking what he is seeing on the telly.
34:20 Speaker 34 I'd really been a quandary as to what to do and I realised that I had a trump card in effect because I was Chris's brother, I could play that card or not.
34:34 Speaker 33 Well, Derek decides to play that card. He picks up the phone and calls John Coombs at the MUA.
34:40 Speaker 34 And he said, "Well, have you got a message for me from Chris?" And I said, "No." But I said, "I'm appalled at what's going on and I'm opposed to what he's doing. And if that's of any use, call me back." But he didn't call me back. Apparently, he stood up on the back of a truck at Darling Harbour, I think it announced to the world that Chris had had a unionist brother and he was opposed to it. So, of course, all hell broke loose.
35:08 Speaker 33 Derek, what made you decide to go public with your criticisms of your brother?
35:13 Speaker 34 This affects all workers and I think that people ought to be aware that it's not just an issue on the waterfront, it's the whole exercise affects all of us. That in fact it involves somebody from my family, you know, I'm really upset about that. One of my sisters in fact said it was like there's been a death in the family, you know.
35:35 Speaker 33 Chris Corrigan, your brother says your tactics on the waterfront have shattered your family. Is that true?
35:41 Speaker 20 Well, I'm very saddened that he's used this opportunity to bring it into the family arena. You see, the problem is that I don't think he's really understands the issues. He's been swept up in this nonsense that this has something to do with the future of unionism. This has got nothing to do with the future of unionism, it's to do with waterfront productivity and work practices on the waterfront.
36:01 Speaker 33 Mr Corrigan, do you think the dispute that's arisen in your family as a result of what's happening on the waterfront points to the fact that other Australian families are also hurting as a result of your tactics?
36:12 Speaker 20 These are difficult times and I'm sure that emotions will get hotter in the next few days rather than cooler.
36:19 Speaker 33 Ooh, they sure will.
36:23 Speaker 02 Right after Easter, the federal court re-adjourns. Remember how the MUA's legal team alleged a conspiracy between Patrick Stevedores and the National Farmers Federation? Well, they're starting to think there's a few more names they could add to that list: Peter Reth and the Commonwealth of Australia.
36:42 Speaker 35 The case may see the key players in the dispute asked to take the witness stand to answer claims that they were involved in a conspiracy. They include Workplace Relations Minister Peter Reth.
36:52 Speaker 07 Well, it's clear, and it's a matter of public record, that Minister Reth has been involved from day one in this whole exercise and culminating in the sacking of the entire workforce of Patrick's on the night of 7th April.
37:09 Speaker 02 On Friday, April 17, 1998, Justice North retires to consider the alleged conspiracy, and also whether it was lawful for Patrick's to fire its 1,400 union workers. Around the country, it feels like a tinderbox.
37:30 Speaker 36 The unrest that had been simmering for the past week at the Fremantle docks finally boiled over. 140 police, armed with full riot gear, descended by boat on the Patrick terminal. With the protesters refusing to budge, police were left with no option but to forcibly remove them.
37:51 Speaker 02 Next time on Conspiracy.
37:53 Speaker 37 I am terrified for Australia and what might be about to happen when a Victorian police minister talks about bloody battles ahead.
38:02 Speaker 02 The cops move in to pick at heartland: Melbourne's East Swanson Dock.
38:07 Speaker 23 We knew that if we did not hold it on the ground, we would never win it in the courts. This is where things are fought and won.
38:16 Speaker 02 It was a standoff, and they eventually had to retreat because they weren't getting past us. And all eyes are on the federal court as the nation hangs on Justice North's decision.
38:27 Speaker 07 It was an existential threat to what was considered one of the foremost unions in the country. If we lost, this was only the beginning.
38:39 Speaker 02 Conspiracy War on the Waterfront is an ABC Rewind production. I'm Jan Fran. Catch you next time.
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