Michael O'Connor

Michael O'Connor

Australian Left Renewal Conference, 2013

The SEARCH Foundation's Australian Left Renewal Conference, 2013, was held, the weekend of April 6-7, 2013,University of Technology Sydney.

Workshop 12 Secure Work in a Green Future

Panel:

Roy Green (UTS, Maunfacturing Report)
Jill Biddington (ACTU Inquiry into Secure Work)
Michael O'Connor (CFMEU) original. Replaced with Tim Ayres (AMWU)
Rose Jackson (ALP Socialist Left, NSW)

Socialist Forum

There was also Stefano de Pieri (ministerial advisor to the Cain government and later a celebrity chef), Candy Broad (née Strahan), then administrator of the Labor Resource Centre, later chief of staff for Joan Kirner, a key figure in the founding of EMILY's List Australia, and a state minister in the Bracks and Brumby Victorian governments), Sara Charlesworth, Max Lorkin (AMWU official), Arthur Apted (now executive chairman of the Sustainable Agriculture Fund, a private investment fund that buys up rural property and manages farms), Bob Hogg (Hawke advisor, former Victorian ALP secretary and partner of Maxine McKew) and his then-wife Caroline Hogg (state MP), Andrew Dettmer (now Queensland AMWU secretary and state ALP president), Tony Lang (a partner at Slater & Gordon, now a Melbourne barrister and board member of the Victorian Council of Social Services), Shane Tregillis (later a capital-market regulator for the central bank of Singapore, then commissioner of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, now chief of the Financial Ombudsman Service), Evan Thornley (then president of the Melbourne University student union, later a McKinsey consultant, founding director of the activist group GetUp and thinktank Per Capita, chairman of the online advertising firm Looksmart, Victorian Labor MP and now CEO of the electric-car firm Better Place), Michael O'Connor (Gillard’s successor as president of the Australian Union of Students and now national CFMEU secretary), John Alford (Monash University student unionist, then a research officer at the Railways Union, author of Gramscian articles on ideology in the ALR, now professor of public management at Melbourne Business School), Ben Kiernan, Charlie D'Aprano (former CPA member and ex-husband of Women’s Liberation activist Zelda D'Aprano), Kim Windsor (then a researcher for the Labor Resource Centre, now operating a management and ‘strategic change’ consultancy), Douglas Kirsner (once a New Left ‘Freudo-Marxist’ philosopher, these days an executive board member of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission), Grant Hehir (then a staffer to Labor-left MP Stewart West, now secretary of the Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance), Mark Burford (author of a 1983 article in the Journal of Political Economy called ‘Prices and Incomes Policy and Socialist Politics’, which argued that ‘socialists in the labour movement’ must support the Accord ‘as a policy that indeed has socialist components’, using it to pursue ‘socialist aims in the Australian setting’; later a senior administrator in the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet under Jeff Kennett and Steve Bracks, and an advisor to Julia Gillard; now a management consultant at Nous Group, and a board member of the ‘progressive’ think-tank Centre for Policy Development) and Bruce Wilson.^[1]