The silence of Sally McManus

At the 2024 May Day rally in Brisbane (Magandjin), then Queensland Premier Steven Miles addressed the crowd before ACTU Secretary Sally McManus took the stage.

Arrayed before the platform were unionists and supporters protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. During the Premier’s speech, many protesters—including members of the Queensland Teachers’ Union, the National Tertiary Education Union, the Australian Services Union, the Electrical Trades Union, student organisations, Justice for Palestine Magan-djin and other rank-and-file unionists—turned their backs on the Premier.

They did so because the Queensland Government was complicit in the destruction of Gaza by permitting weapons manufacturers in Queensland to produce components that assisted Israel’s military campaign of ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Before Sally McManus spoke, one NTEU member had already been arrested. He was dragged away by a line of police with his arms twisted behind his back and held in a painful wrist lock. Two student protesters had already fled in fear, leaving members of Justice for Palestine and other unionists waiting to hear what Australia’s peak trade union leader would say.

When McManus took the microphone, the protesters lowered their flags, turned to face the stage and listened respectfully. They expected the ACTU Secretary to affirm one of the labour movement’s enduring principles: that peace is union business. They held faint hope that Sally McManus would break ranks with Labor and condemn the wholesale murder of Palestinians and to express solidarity with workers, doctors, nurses, journalists and families trying to prevent the devastation of Gaza.

That statement never came.

Instead, McManus spoke about achievements through enterprise bargaining, including improved leave provisions that allowed Australian workers to care for themselves and their families.

The contradiction was stark. Here we were in one of the world’s wealthiest countries, celebrating hard-won workplace rights, while remaining unwilling to extend meaningful solidarity to people whose homes, hospitals, schools and refugee camps were being destroyed by Israel’s occupation forces.

Many health professionals standing before the stage had already spoken publicly of their horror at what was unfolding in Gaza. Yet there was no call from the ACTU for workers to refuse participation in the production or transport of military equipment destined to enable Israel’s war crimes. There was no declaration that Australian workers should not be compelled to contribute to the machinery of war.

This was a profound failure of leadership.

The trade union movement has a long history of taking principled industrial action against injustice, including black bans and refusals to handle goods associated with oppression. Faced with the pleas of unionists on International Workers’ Day, the ACTU leadership declined to exercise that prerogative.

I believe the ACTU should have called on unionists not to manufacture, transport or handle military components destined for Israel and should have supported industrial action by workers who refused such work. That leadership never came. At that time there was clear indication by trade unionists in Italy that workers would have nothing to do with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and what’s more, fully supported the aid flotilla sailing to provide much needed medical and food supplies to the starving people of Gaza.

From that day onward, I regarded Sally McManus—and those union leaders who accepted the arrests of peaceful protesters in front of the May Day stage—as morally complicit through their failure to act. That is my judgment. Others may claim this to be a left-trope, but silence in the face of mass murder carries consequences.

Over the following two years there were statements and carefully chosen words, but no national industrial campaign to prevent Australian labour from contributing to 🛑 stop the war.

For me, that silence will remain Sally McManus’s legacy on union aid abroad. At a moment when many rank-and-file unionists, health workers and students were demanding action, Australia’s most senior union official chose not to lead. The opportunity to demonstrate international working-class solidarity passed without action, and history will ultimately judge the ACTU’s cowardice of leadership.

CFMEU member led away from May Day parade.

Ian Curr

4 August 2026