Sydney is one of the most unaffordable places in the world to buy or rent a house, coming in second behind Hong Kong. There is also a severe lack of public housing, the NSW government selling much needed houses for the poor and disadvantaged while the waiting list has blown out to more than 57,000 people.
But 50 years ago, there was an insurgent workers’ movement in the city that fought the government and property developers who tried to tear down working-class houses and public housing developments in the pursuit of profits. It was led by the militant NSW branch of the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF).
Builders' labourers performed the hardest and most dangerous jobs on worksites, such as digging trenches, pouring concrete and riding crane hooks with steel and other materials to the top of buildings. Without them, building sites ground to a standstill. Using their power, the BLF pioneered “green bans” to save parklands, historic buildings and working-class housing.
The most famous green ban occurred in the Rocks, where BLF members refused to tear down public housing.
The Rocks Resident Action Group had been campaigning to save their community from the greedy fingers of the NSW Liberal government, which, from 1970, showed a keen interest in turning the area into an extension of the CBD, with glitzy hotels, office blocks and shopping centres. The leader of the action group, Nita McRae, was a fifth-generation resident and had contacted around 30 unions. The union that responded first was the BLF.
And respond they did. From November 1971 to May 1975, the BLF instituted a green ban to stop public housing being torn down until all 416 residents were happy with the government’s plan. Builders' labourers stopped work on all sites for the four years of the ban.
The government had spent years neglecting maintenance on the public housing and had raised rents between 200 and 300 percent in an attempt to get residents to move out. In response to these tactics, BLF officials Bob Pringle and Joe Owens said: “Progress should be for all the people and not be detrimental to some for the benefit of others”.
The ban reached a high point in October 1973, when Premier Robert Askin decided to make the Rocks the site of a law-and-order campaign to support his upcoming re-election campaign. Residents and builders' labourers barricaded a demolition site on Playfair Street and climbed onto the roofs and even into surrounding trees. Askin sent in the police, and their response was brutal, arresting large numbers of residents and BLF members, including union Secretary Jack Mundey.
During the life of the green ban, more than 70 buildings were restored by workers. Cheap restaurants, art galleries and craft centres were established, breathing new life into the community. Eventually, the government dropped plans to redevelop the Rocks.
The BLF also helped the Aboriginal community in Redfern establish their own housing block, run by the community.
In 1972, a developer who had bought up a block of houses in which Aboriginal families had lived for decades laid out plans to knock them down and turn them into expensive town houses. Activists reached out to the BLF. Rather than allow the Aboriginal families to be evicted and the houses torn down, union members put a green ban on the site until March 1973.
As a result, Gough Whitlam’s ALP federal government bought the houses and turned them over to the community, who set up much needed low-cost housing for Aboriginal people.
Sixty-five homes were saved, a communal meeting space was established, two nearby factories were turned into a preschool, medical centre, multipurpose hall, workshop, gym and cultural centre, and a co-operative was set up nearby to sell groceries cheaply.
The working-class community of Victoria Street in Kings Cross—inhabited by wharfies, seamen, labourers, city workers and artists—was also under threat. Developer Frank Theeman wanted to tear down terrace houses to put up three large office towers in 1973.
At the request of the 300 residents of Victoria Street, the BLF implemented a green ban. Residents were terrorised by thugs hired by Theeman, threatened with evictions and had their utilities disconnected, and some were forcibly evicted. Locks were removed, doors were kicked in, and bricks and rocks were thrown through windows at night.
The leader of the residents’ action group, Arthur King, was even abducted for several days. After many residents left their homes due to the intimidation, squatters organised to live in the empty dwellings to look after them and prevent arson and vandalism.
While demolition work was halted, the National Trust deemed that Victoria Street had significant historical and architectural merit and ought to be preserved. In January 1974, Theeman was forced to revise his plans significantly to maintain the character of the street, which included scrapping the large office towers, keeping the terrace houses and building several low-cost houses.
The home-grown green bans had become a world-leading example of working-class power. What drove BLF members to take up the defence of working-class communities with such militancy?
The green bans occurred at the same time as a broader radicalisation was happening in society. The BLs had been inspired by the anti-Vietnam War campaign led by students and the anti-apartheid solidarity campaign with Black people in South Africa. The BLF was also one of the first unions to support Aboriginal land rights.
The BLF at this time was also largely influenced by the working-class politics of the Communist Party. Communists spent many years organising the union’s rank and file, who gained confidence from battles they had won for better pay and safe working conditions. And the union’s officials believed that workers ought to have a say over what was built in Sydney, Mundey declaring:
“Yes, we want to build. However, we prefer to build urgently required hospitals, schools, other public utilities, high-quality flats, units and houses, provided they are designed with adequate concern for the environment.”
The BLF was eventually smashed by the government and rival unions, but its legacy lives on: not just in Sydney’s built environment and all the buildings and parklands saved by the BLs and their green bans, but in the traditions of the organised working class, when workers continue to stand up collectively against a system that tries to strip us of our power and our humanity.

Alex King

How a trade union saved working-class communities

Fifty years ago, the world witnessed the first strike for gay rights in one of the more unlikely places: among the leafy suburbs of northern Sydney at Macquarie University. 
Macquarie does not have the same reputation for being a hotbed of radicalism as some other universities. But it was there in 1973 that the Builders Labourers Federation instituted the first “pink ban” to defend a student, Jeremy Fisher, who was kicked out of his residential college for being gay.
The gay liberation movement was just taking off in Australia at the time, after years of heavily moralistic and moderate campaigns that appealed for tolerance and acceptance of gay men and lesbians. Gay liberation was a new, radical, chapter in the fight for LGBTI rights, inspired by the 1969 Stonewall riot in the United States.
Fisher was treasurer of the Macquarie Gay Liberation Club and lived in Robert Menzies College. On the night of 26 May 1973, he attempted suicide. While he was recovering in hospital, a psychiatric registrar interrogated him after the university found gay liberation badges and pamphlets in his room. 
Immediately following his release from hospital, the head of the college, Anglican priest Dr Alan Cole confronted Fisher about his sexuality and role in the Gay Liberation Club. Fisher confirmed he was gay, and in return, Cole told Fisher to repress his feelings, to seek help and that he was also kicked out of the college.
Distraught and angry, Fisher went to the Macquarie University Student Council. Specifically, he spoke to Jeff Hayler and Rod Webb, two members of the Socialist Youth Alliance, the leading left-wing group at Macquarie. “I explained my problem with Robert Menzies College and they immediately went to work, ringing their contacts across Sydney”, recounted Fisher, writing in Overland in 2008.
The fight was on. The council called a snap demonstration demanding the disaffiliation of the college from the university if it refused to readmit Fisher. Importantly however, Hayler and Webb knew that if the campaign was to succeed, they needed to get workers on side. And who better to approach than members of the militant BLF, who were building additions to Robert Menzies College and other university buildings at the time.
The BLF was one of the most radical unions during the 1970s, headed in NSW by Communist Jack Mundey. Under Mundey’s leadership, the BLF had dramatically changed the face of workers’ struggle, not only fighting for pay rises and better working conditions, but also popularising the use of “green bans” to save important green spaces, working-class community areas and public housing. 
When the students first contacted the union, BLF officials were hesitant about taking the issue of gay rights to their members. It was unclear if the labourers would accept the idea of going on strike against homophobia. However, a meeting in late June voted unanimously to down tools and walk off the job at the college. “To our surprise, the men on the job had no hesitation in deciding to go out on strike”, Mundey later said. 
For at least a month, BLF members working on the college were on strike. The union eventually extended the pink ban across all construction on campus when it became clear that university management refused to budge on Fisher’s reinstatement. 
Fisher was not interested in returning to live at Robert Menzies College. When confronted by this in one meeting with Fisher, union official Bob Pringle was initially confused as to why his members were on strike. But as Fisher recalled, Pringle, without much hesitation, then simply said: “It’s the principle of the thing. They shouldn’t pick on a bloke because of his sexuality”.
Eventually, the Builders Labourers and students were able to force the college to readmit Fisher, a big success for the campaign. What makes this win even more impressive is that it happened five years before the high point of the gay liberation movement, the first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in 1978.
The success of the world’s first strike for gay rights cannot be understood without noting the politics of the groups involved. On the student side, the Socialist Youth Alliance was a revolutionary Trotskyist organisation that understood that while students could protest and occupy buildings, it was the working class that had real power in society. Hayler and Webb knew that if they could convince workers to go on strike and seriously inconvenience the bosses, this would be far more effective than student activism alone.
On the workers’ side, the politics of the BLF was heavily influenced by the Communist Party of Australia. Mundey and Pringle, among other officials and rank-and-file workers, were members of the CPA, which took a militant approach to union organising. Not only this; they understood the importance of unions taking up “non-industrial” issues to combat oppression, which undermined working-class unity.
This example of working-class radicalism cuts against the myth that male blue-collar workers are naturally socially conservative. They saw a student being attacked for his sexuality and could not let it rest, even if none of them were gay themselves or even knew anyone who was gay. 
The BLF members also knew that the same people who were discriminating against Fisher were the workers’ own enemies: the bosses of the university and college. So it was only common sense that they took up the pink ban.

When workers went on strike for gay rights 

The bigots are back with a third draft of the religious discrimination bill. Since the marriage equality campaign’s 2017 triumph, the right’s leading voices have been calling for laws to be broadened so that they can attack LGBTI people in the name of religious freedom.
Attorney-General Michaelia Cash announced last month that she would move the bill in federal parliament by December. Former Attorney-General Christian Porter, prior to stepping down in disgrace over rape allegations, twice attempted to pass the bill, before the government was forced to shelve it to manage the outbreak of COVID-19.
“Our government takes the issue of discrimination against Australians on the grounds of their religious beliefs seriously”, Cash told the Australian. Translation: the Morrison government wants to turn discrimination law on its head—not to protect individuals from discrimination, but to protect the right of individuals to discriminate, as long as they can claim a “genuinely held” religious belief.
Supporters of the Cash rewrite include Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, Catholic, Anglican and Jewish religious leaders, and lobby groups such as the Australian Christian Lobby and Freedom for Faith. They argue that progressives want to “cancel” Christians, pointing to the case of rugby union player Israel Folau, whose contract with Rugby Australia was terminated after he said publicly that gay people will go to hell. 
Despite these bigots claiming otherwise, most Australians do not support changes to religious freedom laws. A 2019 Essential poll found that only 38 percent of people thought religious discrimination laws should be strengthened. In a 2018 survey for LGBTI lobby group Just Equal, 82 percent of people opposed the existing right of religious schools to discriminate against staff or students on the basis of their sexual orientation. 
So what are the proposed changes? Cash’s revised draft differs from previous submissions, according to a report in Crikey.com.au, which drew on Liberal Party sources. The Guardian reported in 2019 that the previous draft would have allowed health practitioners to refuse to provide contraception; allowed employers to hire on the basis of faith and set codes of conduct requiring employees to act in accordance with those beliefs; allowed religious schools to expel, suspend or punish students who express different or a loss of religious beliefs; allowed a childcare worker to tell a single mother that she is sinful for denying her child a father; and allowed a doctor to lecture a transgender patient that gender is binary because God made men and women. 
But many religious leaders rejected the last draft because it did not go far enough. They have pushed for broader powers that can override state legislation. The Presbyterian Church of Australia, for instance, wants to overrule Victoria’s recent ban on conversion therapy. 
“The Victorian law criminalises Christianity, it affects prayer or counselling. The federal Act would need to override the states”, the church’s moderator-general Peter Barnes was reported as saying in the Australian. “The [previous] draft legislation was useless, but the Victorian situation has really shown its weakness.”
A number of civil rights organisations have slammed the proposed changes, including Equality Australia, the Australian Human Rights Commission and the Law Council of Australia. Trade unions such as the New South Wales Teachers Federation attacked the 2020 draft, saying it would undermine women’s rights and entrench discrimination in the education system:
“The current bill takes away the rights of students and staff who are presently protected under anti-discrimination laws. Religious schools and other educational institutions will maintain special exemptions allowing them to discriminate. Students could be expelled due to their sexuality and staff in same-sex marriages can be sacked, while these schools continue to receive public funding.”
Among the Liberal Party’s hard-right membership, however, the bill is wildly popular. With an election looming, party leaders are throwing a bone to their base. “The interest at stake is not free speech but recruitment of energised campaign workers for 2022”, Malcolm Knox wrote in a 3 July opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald. But its broader unpopularity requires Cash, rather than the prime minister, to be the face of the bill. If all goes sour, Cash can take the blame, while Morrison gets away untarnished.
Labor is playing dumb on the new rewrite. This is hardly surprising. The ALP provided barely any resistance to previous drafts, aside from feeble statements about negotiating with the government on amendments. We can expect the same or worse this time around. An internal party review blamed its 2019 electoral defeat on the supposed conservatism of working-class communities, including religious and multicultural ones. This has provided Labor with an excuse to mimic the Liberals’ pro-business and anti-progressive agenda. Labor could well support the bill if there is no public pressure—like when it supported the ban on same-sex marriage until it became clear that the campaign was a winner.
The “religious freedom” bill is a massive threat to LGBTI people, women and workers’ rights. With little hope of opposition from the Labor Party, the rest of us must campaign against the bill. Actions planned in <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/310017707424943">Sydney</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/201650381847033">Brisbane</a> for 14 August are a crucial opportunity to do this. We won marriage equality; we can win this campaign too.

How a trade union saved working-class communities

When workers went on strike for gay rights

Knock the Liberals out in the third round of ‘religious freedom’ bill fight

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