August 2002 Volume 83 Number 8 "serving the protectors"
By Trevor Haskell PASA Vice President

When police unionise

The time or place of one’s reading can add to or subtract from the merits of a book. While at the Police Association of NSW conference, I read When police unionise – the politics of law and order in Australia, by Mark Finnane.

Finnane is described as a professor of history and a leading historian of Australian policing and criminal justice.

I have read about unionism generally during my labour studies education, but little about police unions other than in various police union journals and newspaper editorials.

My own history with police unionism – despite 30 years as a member of a police union – really involves the past 13 years I have spent active in the Police Association. During my labour studies education, I researched and wrote on police union campaigns of the day in a variety of essays. It was with heightened interest that I read of those events in this book. The 1990s pay campaigns, the Mundingburra by-election in Queensland and royal commissions.

The book is a shortish history of the evolution of police unionism in Australia. In general, I found the style easy to read: it is not an in-depth, analytical tome, but perhaps something of a starting point. The author refers often to “we” in judging actions through the book. I found that interesting. I suspect it is his view of self as the public view or of academic fellows. He does, on occasion, more accurately refer to “I” on some of his judgements.

The subject matter was of personal and professional interest, which always helps me in reading. The book is more than a simple list of chronological events. The chapters are grouped into key-issue areas with major or significant events of various decades highlighted. There is analysis of the cause and effects of actions by police unions and others for and against police unions. It also says much on police management and government interplay and the alliances made around policing to further issues of law and order and police union agenda.

The book had me shaking my head when I read that events of the modern era that I thought were novel and innovative had been tried in the past. Clearly, the police union movement in Australia has always had a dynamic edge to it, despite legislation that is more restrictive than other unions. Law and order has been a vital tool that governments and oppositions have used to serve their own interests, usually that of getting elected. The issue of alliances within policing was perhaps the key point that the book raised. It clearly identifies the successes and failures of some alliances but, still, trying to define what a success was, is very much dependant on your view.

Clearly, a united police union can and has successfully wielded political clout over the past 90 years of police unionism in Australia. However the book shows that the gains of wielding such power have not always been without subsequent redress. The goals of police unions have remained relatively unchanged and might beg the question as to how successful our gains have been. The first police strike in the world was in France in 1905 and was about salaries, lodging allowances and stopping oppressive conduct of overbearing superiors. Pensions were at the heart of the earliest police strikes in Australia.

An event that took my interest was in 1931 (the Depression) on an issue that is very much alive today. It tells of First Constable William Resolute Gibbons, who had applied to transfer from Sydney to another station due to friction with his superior officers. His application was rejected by an inspector who claimed that Gibbons was a “loafer and a liar of the worst type, a dangerous man and a man not amenable to discipline and a man opposed to law and order”. In short, his integrity was challenged.

Gibbons took out a libel suit for damages (supported by the union) and it was defended on the grounds that it was a privileged document to be treated like a communication between ministers of the Crown, or perhaps the armed services. Because of the potential impact, governments and commissioners were all interested in the outcome. It was fought through to the High Court.

Gibbons lost in the Supreme Court but won a unanimous verdict in the High Court, which clearly supported the notion that police were not like the armed services and a police inspector’s report on another officer did not have absolute privilege. Clearly, what we write as supervisors about job applicants or about other members is open to challenge at the highest levels.

The book is full of historical tales but with a useful review of more current events, royal commissions and union alliances included. The book was in my mind as I observed the interplay between the Police Association of NSW president and the minister and his shadow at the conference. In the discussions about services and conditions, it provided some interesting insight into what had been tried before and where the union’s direction was to go.

Are royal commissions a catastrophe or a blessing? The politics of police is interesting and this book provides some useful insights that might assist in shaping the future. On occasion, there seemed to be a merging of police unions as police management but, generally, appropriate distinctions were maintained.

Owing to some recent events, the book is likely to be seen by some as provocative. Determining whether a campaign was successful or not and, indeed, even identifying what the goals of a campaign were, is open to interpretation. Some police union campaigns have been arguably in the members’ interests and less in the interests of the government or society of the day. This is a vexed issue for all unions when there is potential for assertions that the wider public good should always take precedence over the individual or minority need (an argument that the politically powerful and the well-off will often make).

For me, the book reinforced the membership need for strong and democratic police unions, the potential strength of a national police union, and the need for all alliances to be always carefully considered.

As one of those evil readers who tend to earmark pages of interest, I found my copy of the book a bit shabby-looking by the half-way mark and had to amend my behaviour. From my completely unbiased, balanced, neutral, fair and right-minded point of view, the book is worth a read for those interested in the police.

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