The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 2

2 THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD FRIDAY, MAY 9, 1997 'Sour, bitter' Hanson exploiting fear, says PM Union numbers droppin says Keith Mr Howard is also battling the Victorian Premier, Mr Ken-nett, who yesterday ignored the Prime Minister's warnings to curb his criticisms by accusing the Federal Government of being uncomfortable with multiculturalism and not acting quickly to confront Ms Hanson. This was denied by the Immigration Minister, Mr Ruddock. Mr Howard said now that Ms Hanson "claimed" to lead a political party, she had to be held accountable for her views. She was wrong in suggesting Aborigines were not disadvantaged, that Australia was in danger of being swamped by Asians and that the country was heading for civjl war. "The political campaign mounted by the member for Oxley seeks to exploit fear and instability without offering solutions or hope," he said.

The Opposition's treasury spokesman, Mr Gareth Evans, representing the Opposition Leader, Mr Beazley, said Mr Howard had made a "very explicit assault on the core views" of Ms Hanson. By MICHAEL MILLETT Political Correspondent The Queensland Independent MP, Ms Pauline Hanson, was waging a political campaign based on exploiting fear and instability in the community and was driven by a "sour, bitter, narrow-minded view of our past and the Prime Minister said last night. Delivering his first major set-piece attack on the leader of the fledgling One Nation party, Mr Howard said Ms Hanson's policy prescriptions would do nothing to resolve the country's problems and would actually make them worse. And Louise Williams reports that the Indonesian Foreign Minister, Mr Ali Alatas, said Ms Hanson's One Nation party would damage Australian-Asian relations. Speaking in the East Timorese capital of Dili, Mr Alatas said of the One Nation party: "It is damaging to Asian-Australian relations, it is damaging for our whole common effort to work together in such contexts as APEC." Indonesia has previously declined to comment on Australia's internal politics.

Mr Howard defended the bulk of people flocking to the Hanson banner, saying it was unfair to describe them as "bigoted, narrow-minded and Ms Hanson was echoing their own smouldering resentment about the "stultifying political correctness" which had afflicted Australia over the past decade. "I know why some Australians have stopped to listen to the member for Oxley. I say to them, however, she has no answers to your problems," he said. "The Hanson cure would be worse than the disease." Mr Howard was speaking in Sydney at the opening of the AustralAsia Centre of the Asia Society, a United States nongovernment institution set up to promote contacts with Asia. The Government decided last week in the wake of its slumping poll figures and Ms Hanson's rising popularity that Mr Howard should use the speech to tackle Ms Hanson directly.

Academics put on a happy face to woo corporate dollar union fees. Ms Caird said her union had mounted a very successful campaign to switch members to an alternative, such as bank deductions, credit card payments or invoice. The union's new strategy was put in place to pre-empt the Government's decision to cease automatic deduction of fees without a new authorisation, she said. Ms Caird said she would be surprised if her union had lost any members from Mr Reith's department because they were pro-union and were "the first to stand up and say 'no' to any non-union enterprise agreement in this "The piece of information he Reith doesn't have is how many have signed up to alternative methods of payment. That's our business, and he will never know," she said.

Mr Reith admitted he did not know how many public servants had switched to bank or credit card payments, but did not expect many would have done so. The CPSU regards the Government's policy on union fees as having no relation to compulsory unionism. Instead, it claims the policy is a brutal attempt to try to de-unionise the public sector workforce by discriminating against its members. The union has also launched a claim in the Federal Court to overturn the Government's decision. Ms Caird accused the Government of discrimination, saying it was still prepared to have auto By BRAD NORINGTON Industrial Editor The Federal Government is anticipating a huge fall in union membership among Commonwealth public servants after the Minister for Industrial Relations, Mr Reith, yesterday seized on figures showing that up to 50 per cent of employees from his own department may have quit their union.

Mr Reith said 50 per cent of his department had abandoned automatic payroll deduction of union fees after the Government had insisted on receiving a fresh written authority from public servants before union fees were collected. Declaring his determination to stamp out compulsory unionism, Mr Reith admitted it was "early But he used figures from his own department as a sign of what was occurring throughout the Public Service. A collapse of union membership in the public sector would be devastating, not only to the industrial strength of unions concerned as the Government continues to cut jobs, but also would have a significant impact on the union movement. Overall density of union membership in Australia of 3 1 per cent of the workforce is boosted significantly by a rate as high as 55 per cent in the Public Service, compared with just 24 per cent in the private sector. Membership in the public sector has already declined by 7 percentage points over the past two years.

The national secretary of the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), Ms Wendy Caird, said Mr Reith's reckoning was "nonsense" because he had failed to take account of public servants who had switched to other methods of paying their 1 3 I '-y X. 1 By HAMISH McDONALD Foreign Editor It was a black-tie dinner at the plush ANA Hotel in the Rocks with Asian-inspired cuisine and artistic performances to lighten up the speeches, the Prime Minister as special guest, and the country's top corporate brass marshalled by Western Mining's Hugh Morgan focusing on the importance of Asia. All of which should have made the invited Asian specialists from Australian universities feel like a kind of royalty for the night Except they weren't Many were quietly seething inside their dinner suits and formal frocks, dragooned into attending by vice-chancellors anxious not to offend Mr Morgan and other big corporate moneybags. "It's a classic steamroll by the big end of town," said one academic, who asked not to be named. away from our own Asian think tanks who do things like tracking Asia's new elites or writing textbooks for Australian schools, into "high-profile networking" (the Asia Society's forte has been prestigious conferences with big-name statesmen as guest speakers).

Another is what it says about Australia. "It might lead people in Asia to perceive Australia merely as a branch office of the United States," said Mr Carrillo Gant-ner, chairman of Melbourne University's Asialink Centre and director of the Myer family company Barclay Investment "That is not to our advantage. We deal with Asia as an independent nation that does not carry the whole range of US imperial baggage, although we are increasingly carrying baggage of our own but we have to deal with that" The launch of the AustralAsia Centre of the New York-based Asia Society, a policy-debating body founded in 1956 by the Rockefellers, has caused great anguish among our Asianists, not least because of the alacrity with which Australian companies have rushed to fund it With a secretariat directed by retired senior diplomat Richard Woolcott, the AustralAsia Centre boasts big business, political, bureaucratic and media names on its council, but with the exception of Professor Ross Garnaut, virtually none of our leading Asian scholars. Most of those contacted yesterday, including several at the dinner, expressed deep misgivings, along with some admiration for what the Asia Society does on its home ground. One worry is about diversion of the finite corporate dollar, matic payroll deductions for medical insurance, credit unions, banks and social clubs without fresh written authorisations.

The end to automatic payroll deduc tions has come in stages, from department to department, with many coming into effect on May "The Hanson cure would be worse than the disease" Mr Howard last night. 1 this year. "ALL STOCK ESPECIALLY 20,000 steel jobs at risk if no MINi closure: BHP REDUCED FOR MOTHERS DAY" Imagine our surprise when we saw this sign inside Violet was most keen to advise her loyal regular clients NOT to miss this offer. Mother will love the Amethyst Brooches and Pendants, often set with Seed Pearls, such a feminine combination. Just arrived, Antique 'Fob' pieces of the nautical theme.

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Guilty of assault Frederick Bloomfield, 22, was found guilty in the NSW District Court yesterday of assault occasioning actual bodily harm to pilot Ian Rooseboom, who became the public face of Ansett through its advertising campaigns. Bloomfield pleaded not guilty claiming Mr Rooseboom, who suffered brain damage in the attack, had hit him first Austudy delay A Government official has admitted that students seeking reviews of their Austudy payments are waiting "10 to 12 Of the 6,200 applications received so far, only a third had been finalised. Touch of farce Newcastle has stopped a private detective's council-funded visits to about 18 illegal brothels, which he was hired to track down. The Lord Mayor, Councillor Greg Heys, said yesterday he assumed the detective had been having sex with prostitutes. Powerball Last night's Powerball draw was 2, 17, 22, 41, 45.

Powerball: 18. By NATHAN VASS and BRAD NORINGTON The jobs of more than 20,000 steelworkers around Australia would have been threatened unless the Newcastle steelworks was closed, BHP claimed last night at a public meeting in Newcastle attended by a disappointingly small crowd of 200. The general manager of the Newcastle plant, Mr Bob Kirkby, said the decision had been "a very heart-wrenching experience" for BHP but had been vital if the company were to maintain a steel-making presence in Australia. "At the end of the day if we had not made this decision there are 20,000 other steel-workers in Australia whose jobs would have been very insecure," Mr Kirkby said. He conceded he had been nervous about attending the community meeting last night However, far from being savaged by the small crowd of about 200, Mr Kirkby was applauded after he gave BHP's reason for the closure.

The meeting had been called by Newcastle City Council and the local branch of the Australian Workers' Union to pressure BHP to reverse its decision to close the steelworks in 1999, costing 2,500 jobs. Last night's meeting was meant to have been the next step in a concerted campaign of pressure on BHP, but local political figures conceded that the small turnout was a setback. But unions, backed by a Liberal Party MP, plan to campaign over coming weeks for a buyout by workers of the steelworks as a way of saving jobs and maintaining a strong Australian steel industry. BHP has already rejected such a plan as impractical but the response has not deterred the Australian Workers Union (AWU) or the Parliamentary Secretary for Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, Mr Tony Abbott. The Newcastle branch secretary of the AWU, Mr Maurie Rudd, said a buyout of the Newcastle steelworks was feasible because it had been operating at a profit and was reaching world records in production.

Mr Abbott said a buyout that used workers' redundancy payouts and other investment funds could turn the BHP workers at Newcastle into "capitalists" who had a stake in the business. The Federal Opposition industry spokesman, Mr Simon Crean, said last night the steelworks could be saved if the Federal Government was prepared to develop a new steel plan. "The simple fact of the matter is BHP will invest somewhere and there will be growth in steel-making around the world. "Unless we have a strategy to secure a slice of the action, we will miss out and become a hole in the ground for iron ore and end up importing product from overseas." It has been suggested that keeping the plant open until 1999 could cost BHP up to $100 million. The Premier, Mr Carr, met the Prime Minister, Mr Howard, in Sydney yesterday to seek a $10 million donation from Canberra towards a new Hunter jobs fund.

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