Victorian Trades Hall Council. The voice of Victorian workers since 1856.

The ACTU media unit’s messages, coinciding with the timing of the launch of the FWA is clear…it was worth electing Rudd and Gillard in 2007…everything will be alright. Compared with - it was great to get rid of that ruling class provocateur John Howard, but the struggle to win back workers’ ‘rights at work’ continues.

Implied within the ACTU line is that if there is any criticism of the federal government’s IR policies and its ‘new’ FWA framework then such criticism is out of line.

The great drawn out campaigns to see Howard off during 1996-2007 are being subsumed into: what the Federal ALP does is better by definition – no need for analysis, no room for analysis. The historical record is not to emphasise the hard grind to vote Howard out and the related struggle to win back, or at least neutralise, the so called “Howard battlers”. No one should forget a meeting of Tasmanian forestry workers cheering Howard in 2004 or a group of Northern Tasmanian health workers clapping him over his desperate stunt to save a hospital in 2007. These were embarrassing events in labour history and illustrations of how hard the fight was to see Howard off.

When Howard lost his parliamentary seat it was a great highlight.

But the federal ALP government is now paying lip service to the trade union campaign to beat Howard. You can feel its reluctance to acknowledge the historic campaign every time a senior or junior member of the government speaks.

When ex-union ALP MP’s in particular speak in favour of retaining major elements of Howard’s IR legacy, you have to wonder. Shades of the embarrassment of health workers clapping from a North Tasmanian balcony of a hospital?

Back to the FWA. Some in the labour movement are putting all of their money on this horse. Is it a 1000m, 2000m or 3000m race? Regardless, ordinary workers will be watching the initial decisions with a wary eye.

The ‘Your Rights at Work’ campaign of 2004-07 deserves a dignified result. WorkChoices needs to be not only to be deemed ceremonially dead but dead in all practical terms.

There was a palpable yearning amongst the majority of working people in 2007 to get rid of Howard over WorkChoices. They rightly demand that this expectation be recognised by the new contemporary political elite in Canberra.

There is no appetite for having a sanitised version of their expectations imposed on them.

You can’t bargain away the facts. There are stubborn views persisting about how success is measured in terms of the historic ‘Your Rights at Work” campaign. No one should misjudge this embedded gut feeling.

There was a call to “celebrate” on July 1 the end of WorkChoices. Apparently a few people cut a cake in Canberra but there were no balloons or streamers at the hundreds of thousands of workplaces across the country. There is a feeling that with many WorkChoices-type restrictions remaining on how workers can bargain, what they can bargain about and where unions can assist, then getting excited is not the mind set.

With the recent decision to grant no pay rise to the lower paid by the Australian Fair Pay Commission (AFPC), the freeing up the bargaining process is more essential than ever.

Wait and see is as good as it gets.