To suggest that Australian trade unions have issued a call to "man the barbecues" over labor reform might seem snide -- but the beloved "barbie" has been given an official role in a looming clash with the government.
The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has called for the biggest protest in the country's history today against Prime Minister John Howard's plans to implement what it calls anti-worker labor laws.
The barbecue, as symbolic of the Australian way of life, regularly crops up in debate over the legislation after a ringing criticism last month by opposition Labor Party leader Kim Beazley.
"John Howard has found the weekend barbecue stopper," he said.
"Those weekend barbecues will stop as workers are obliged to negotiate away their weekends, their hours, their penalty rates, under the legislation that he's put forward."
But while there might be an element of self-deprecating humor in the reference to the national delight in dropping a prawn or a steak on the fire, it is underpinned by serious concerns that Australia's culture is changing for the worse.
Anglican, Catholic and Uniting Church leaders have expressed fears that family life would be sacrificed to the economy under the reforms.
Anglican archbishop of Sydney Peter Jensen said there was a need "for preserving shared time for children, families, relationships for all Australians. That's what life is about, not merely the economy. Without shared time we may as well be robots," he said.
Former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke attacked the proposed shake-up as being a further "Americanization" of policy and destructive to Australia's proud claim of a "fair go" for all.
The reforms would "destroy concepts and principles which Australians have considered to be at the very heart of the national character" such as "the belief that might is not right," he said.
Howard, prime minister for nearly 10 years, now has the might to push his long-cherished reforms through both houses of parliament.
In July, he became Australia's most powerful leader in a generation when his ruling Liberal-National coalition took control of the Senate, which had previously blocked attempts at labor reform.
Howard has said the reforms were necessary to allow Australia's economy to remain internationally competitive, echoing former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when she set out to break the powerful unions in the 1980s.
While Australian unions have already lost some of the power they once had, the debate over the reforms has seen Howard's popularity ratings drop sharply, indicating that the concerns of church and labor leaders are widely shared.
RSS