Comrades, sisters and brothers,

Your actions in sticking together on the picket lines are bringing alive the spirit of solidarity and collective support, on which our movement is founded. You are forcing Howard and Reith to show the true nature of their attacks on the Maritime Union of Australia, as attacks on the democratic rights of the working class to defend itself, as attacks in the name of the power of the bosses to break us up into weak individual units.

Your resistance to this Government is inspiring the Australian working class, and indeed workers around the world, to know that together we are strong, and that we do not have to submit to injustice, that we can win.

Your actions show that when the law of the land is on the bosses' side and doesn't protect our rights, that by defying the law in huge numbers we can protect ourselves. Our defiance of the law in maintaining our pickets is threatening the very authority of those who rule over us. Now that so many of you have gathered together and shown your support, I believe that we can achieve much more than just a return to a fully unionised waterfront, we can win a lot more for the Australian working class.

There are vast reserves of anger with this Government, and if we give our wholehearted support to others, they will be rallied to a broader cause. By attacking native title, the Howard Government has angered indigenous Australians and indeed the majority of Australians who want reconciliation, who want to feel that this is a decent society. There is anger about increased charges for nursing homes, cuts in funds to child care centres, reduced support for the unemployed, forcing young adults to be dependent on their families, restrictions on support for students, propping up private health insurance instead of the public health system, withdrawal of support and English language lessons to migrants, mining uranium at Jabiluka, allowing the rich to avoid tax and on it goes. All these angry people need our support, and they can support us. I urge all of you here to make the link between our right to organise effectively in unions as workers, and our support for social justice on all these other issues. On behalf of the trade union movement, I invite all these people who have been campaigning for funding, for services, for respect, for recognition, to join our assemblies. I urge you here today to welcome them, to invite them to speak, to listen and consider how our society could provide for their demands.

Particularly I would like to welcome our Aboriginal sisters and brothers. Howard's Wik legislation is meant to extinguish Aboriginal legal rights to land just as the Workplace Relations Act removes our legal right to organise. Howard is getting ready for a double dissolution election. Our support for native title is urgent.

I'm glad to see Labor leaders and politicians at the picket lines. I would however like to remind them, that this is the struggle of the unions, and we expect them to act with us, but not for us. We will not settle for anything less than the number of jobs on the waterfront that existed before Patrick sacked its workforce. We are not interested in any settlement that means conceding legitimacy to laws which threaten our right to organise and stand collectively. Neither could we call a truce and wait till Labor wins the next election.

I am putting to Kim Beazley, and the ALP, that we require a set of commitments from them, including the repeal of the Workplace Relations Act, the secondary boycott provisions and other anti-union laws, reversal of the funding cuts and a new highly progressive taxation system with no GST.

I also put it to the union movement, to the ALP and to the Australian people that the economic reform program that we have accepted, and in many cases helped to implement, since 1983, has not benefited the majority of us, but only a wealthy minority. The wharfies would have been right if they had resisted waterfront reform - because over the last 15 years it's been used to cut their jobs and to increase profits. We're supposed to be grateful because reform creates jobs, yet we have record unemployment despite 15 years of reform. Global competitiveness is for us a competition for the worst working conditions at the lowest rates of pay in the world, and we're not going to play that game anymore.

It's time for us to look at organising our economy in a different way. On behalf of the ACTU Executive I am asking you to work with community groups to identify new priorities, alternative proposals for social programs and projects to meet the needs of everyone, for homes, for jobs, for health, for education, for public transport, and especially the needs of children, Aboriginal children, migrant children, all the children of Australia.

I will be putting to Kim Beazley and the ALP, that they make a commitment to give priority to these social programs and projects over any issues of global competitiveness or profitability. If any owners complain that they cannot run their business profitably, then we expect that they should be relieved of responsibility to run that business, starting with Patrick Stevedores. We expect Labor to promise to take over the waterfront and provide jobs to all the members of the MUA. The waterfront could be a test case for a new democratically run industry, which allows productivity improvements to translate into shorter hours, rather than job cuts.

If Kim Beazley cannot make the commitments that we seek, then I shall consider whether we can find an alternate leader of the Labor Party who will, or whether we need to establish a new form of political representation for the working class. We can defeat the Liberal Party at the coming election, but we don't want to do it just in order to get a rerun of the Hawke-Keating years.

I believe that we can obtain political representation that we can hold to account to implement the demands, to meet the interests that our campaign represents. We can do this if we continue to organise, and to observe democratic principles, freedom of speech and informed collective decision making with accountable leaders.

That is my vision for where our movement could go from here. But let us remember the immediate issues.

Howard is out to intimidate us. He needs to restore the authority of the system, which is in danger of crumbling as we stand up to it. In every state but NSW the police are being prepared to use greater force to break up our pickets. Howard is not ruling out bringing in the army to the docks. If this happens, you can be assured that Bill Kelty's prediction of the biggest picket in the history of Australia will come true. We are ready to stop the country if necessary, although we do not want to have to do it. We must prepare to defend ourselves from the violence which Howard will almost certainly use against us.

In order to keep you and the general public better informed, from tomorrow the ACTU will be commencing publication of a small daily newspaper, and we will be calling on you to help distribute it. Perhaps it will grow to replace Murdoch's dreadful lying Daily Telegraph...