Lucky, I speak fluent CFMEU… The construction union’s boss, John Setka, has had a lot to say in the media recently. For a dark, brooding, silent type he really does need to stop f*#king swearing. No offence – I’m inserting that hashtag in the original, regional trade union dialect, like when you’re in the general region of a TV camera and you want to scare a self-regarding national football league into submitting or the shiny new vote-winning football stadium gets it.
Setka says he can’t understand what the swearing big deal is. He says, if he was called Gordon Ramsay he’d have his own f-bombing TV show. But then he would have to change out of his black muscle t-shirt into a white apron and this could lead to a demarcation dispute over clothing allowances and personal brand.
“You know what? They can all go and get f…ked. And if they’re worried about my language, they can go f…k themselves doubly because, guess what, if I changed my name to Gordon Ramsay they’d give me my own TV show and I’d become a big f..king star.”
This obscenity-dripping reality show idea has legs. But I’d give cooking a miss because, as any apprentice on the tools can tell you, there are only so many ways to make a 6am ham and cheese toastie from the servo, washed down with three Red Bulls on the way to work. Maybe he could host a new version of The Block where in Episode 1 the contestants get promised a pile of money and then nothing gets built for the rest of the season until the Victorian government agrees to give their Big Build lollypop sign holders the Big Pay Increase they deserve…
Putting aside culinary questions around MasterChef’s socialist credentials, the CFMEU and its sweary protesting members are an interesting intersecting point for modern left-wing protest with their old-school f-bombing, physical protests, and mispronunciation of phrases like ‘solidarity brudda’. There is a bruising masculinity that you don’t often see these days that our new Victorian Minister for Modifying Male Behaviour should investigate, even if it is to check-in on the vein bursting foreheads of our hard-working union elite to ask R U OK? Because sometimes union officials don’t seem to be okay, especially when trying to shut down a building site, replicate chef Adriano Zumbo’s croquembouche challenge, or talk about their feelings.
The whole world has feminised but the CFMEU come from an age when men were men – like Attila the Hun, or Genghis Khan. Or dropping barbells in the gym and refusing to towel off the sweat on the bench press until somebody’s Lycra-encased personal trainer uploads the photographic evidence to Instagram and tags it ‘#ewwww’. Compare them with the HECS-bound flaccidity of today’s ubiquitous university protesters, spray-canning the memorials of people who led much more significant lives than them and asking for the unisex port-a-loos to be cleaned regularly so they can glamp in the style they’re parents paid money to make them accustomed to.
With so much agitprop in the air, it’s sometimes hard to breathe. Down in Melbourne Docklands permanent construction site they’ve got the Art of Banksy exhibition full of edgy middle-class graffiti that would look great on your lounge room wall juxtaposed to the burgundy couch. Banksy is great, but it seems more than coincidence, I ended up instead at the brilliant Rennie Ellis photo exhibition.
Ellis’s photography captures Melbourne’s soul in the 1970s to 90s from sport and sex to migrant communities and rock and roll, but with a particular interest in the protests of the time – Vietnam, gay rights, environmentalism, kangaroos, and Holden cars. The thing is the protesters he captures appear much more interesting than today’s soulless automatons. Animated, funny, creative, quite often stoned, there is a heady long-haired libertarianism missing now from current activists who most resemble Dr Zhivago’s joyless Soviet operative Pasha, driving his armoured fundamentalist train across Russia to give everyone a good talking too.
Ironically, this exhibition is at our State Library, which is Melbourne’s Ground Zero for protest groups on the grift. To get in, you must wade way through angry hipsters and try to avoid tripping over river-to-the-sea banners and politicised Jehovah’s Witnesses wanting to talk about Armageddon.
Maybe I’m reading too much into this. Union leaders and protesters just want their 15 minutes of fame. So, it’s not really a left or right thing.
15-minutes seems to be the currency of choice for Australia’s modern politicians. I’d never heard of New South Wales Greens MP Cate Faehrmann until she appeared on Sunrise to call for decriminalisation of cocaine so it’s available just like alcohol. Which I guess means 16-year-olds will be able to buy it using their fake ID after chatting up the door security just like they currently do at nightclubs.
The Greens say we should stop demonising users because so many people want to use it recreationally, which I guess if you’re stoned is the same argument you could make for continued use of petrol-engine cars.
Like many Greens supporters, the party may be under the impression that cocaine, like VAD and heroin, is carbon neutral. But I reckon this is just another example of greenwashing, given the illegal carbon-churning private jets used to bring the stuff onto our shores.
But that’s the thing with the Greens, they may make no sense and they might want to normalise dangerous recreational drugs but at least they don’t swear like trade union officials when on television.
