Bob Carnegie, a working-class activist, discusses the 1985 SEQEB dispute in Australia, emphasizing its historical and personal significance. He highlighted the global economic context, including Reagan’s anti-union policies and Thatcher’s monetarist approach, which led to widespread de-industrialization and the closing of coal mines in Britain.
A big thank you to the Brisbane Labour History Association for putting on this talk.
In Australia, the Prices and Incomes Accord weakened union power, partly responsible for a decline in union membership from 51% to 12%. The Electrical Trade Union’s fight against subcontracting in the electricity industry sector led to the sacking of 1,007 workers, widespread blackouts lay offs and decline in maintenance and safety in the electricity grid. Despite the SEQEB defeat, Bob Carnegie stressed the importance of resisting tyranny and injustice, quoting United States labour organiser, William Z. Foster, on the value of fighting for working-class rights: “No strike or struggle is wholly ever lost, that it’s far, far better to fight a losing fight than to have never fought at all. And most tellingly, he said that an unresisting working class will soon find itself on a rice diet.“
“I was collecting money for the SEQEB workers in a covered can, and eventually I got arrested by the police again, and they confiscated the tin. But this is the weird part, and this is where I started thinking some trade union leaders are starting to toe a certain line, and my assistant secretary of the Seamen’s Union called me up because he’d seen me on TV getting lumbered about collecting this money. And I went up on Monday.
On the Monday morning, I got carpeted, saying that you’ve misplaced workers money, you’ve been delinquent in it. I said, but the police arrested me and took the can. I said, I didn’t lose it. He said, No, you’re completely, utterly irresponsible.
…
And anyway, I went down to the ETU and paid $147.20 into their strike fund because I felt, for some weird reason, I felt that it was my fault, because I’ve been told it was, and then we get the money back. $147.20 is paid back to the ETU because they’d confiscated it illegally. But it started giving me this feeling that in Australia, you can be militant.
Even in left wing unions, you can be militant up to a point. And if you start going past what the point of respectability is, you’re in danger of being ostracized, and that is precisely what happened to me during the SEQEB dispute, because in August, there was a section I knew some people who were in a political organization, and they said, oh, there’s a rumor going around, Bob, that you’re after jailing and the arrests and the bashings and everything else, you’re too scared to go on a picket line.
Again. I said, What? So I broke my neck getting to a picket line, of course. And the picket line was that was in August, on exhibition Wednesday at the at the exhibition grounds, at the echo. So we got maximum attention. We got we got arrested. About 20 of us we went, including Bernie Neville.
We got arrested and got processed, and I got fined $500 out of that. And under the Electricity (Continuity of Supply) Act 1985 (Qld), which eventually was thrown out by the High Court. I then got carpeted again by my own union. About ‘why you’re getting arrested in picket lines, you’ve done enough’. But can you ever do enough when you’re fighting an injustice or fighting tyranny? What’s enough? No, it’s that question. Is everything based on ‘enough’? Or is it that we should resist tyranny? And I thought it was that we would resist tyranny no matter what the cost, and that can leave you out on a limb. And it certainly left me out on a limb.” – Bob Carnegie.
Two interesting things about what Bob said. The central role of Bernie Neville and the strike committee can’t be stressed enough. For example, like Bob, I was arrested with Bernie on the picket line. It led to our long partnership of activism until the end of Bernie’s life.
Secondly, is the danger’s of thrusting people like Bob into the role of martyr. Bob was arrested nine times during the dispute and spent time in Boggo Road. Yet he felt cast out on a limb by his own union and by the Left.
Bob may not remember this, but at a meeting of the Trade Union Support Group in late July 1985, I tried to point out the dangers of martyrdom for both the individual and for the movement as a whole. This was after Bob was arrested and savagely beaten by cops at a picket outside the New Farm SEQEB depot. Understandably, Bob was not impressed by the harshness of my criticism given what he had just been through. He lunged at me in the meeting, only prevented from clocking me by the tables that separated us. He thought I was a student activist living in an ivory tower divorced from the rigours of working class struggle. There might have been some truth in his retort as police generally bashed workers more severely than students. But, as an Aboriginal woman, Cherie Imlah, pointed out to Bob at the meeting, I had spent eight years on struggle street, unemployed on and off for 8 years because of my political oppositionto the Bjelke-Petersen government.
I’ll close here with a song of hope from Phil Monsour about another dispute that Bob led …
Ian Curr
20 July 2025