Why the NTEU, our most radical union, should stop taking political positions on… most things

Everyone knows that Monty Python’s Life of Brian is really about the British left in the late 1970s (“Peoples Front of Judaea”/”splitters!”/”What have the Romans ever done for us?”), but few realise that Monty Python and the Holy Grail is about the British left in the early 1970s — and the failure of the wave of strikes at the time to roll on into a revolutionary situation. In the final scene, as Arthur is prancing about, the whole history is turned into cosplay when a cop car roars into the scene and thug Met cops jump out and shut the whole film down, with a hand going over the camera and an “alright, that’s enough”.

That’s pretty much how I feel about the NTEU, sometimes. The tertiary academics union does vital work, under tough conditions, on the very real matter of what sort of lives knowledge workers of a certain type will have: are people going to be offered decent jobs, with security, or is their love of a discipline and scholarship going to be exploited to squeeze every last signifier out of them? 

And yet, the political cosplay of ancient battles, in a lethal new environment, never fully goes away. The union’s leadership and active membership are so far to the left that its old guard — accused (unfairly in my view) of complacency and siding with the university establishment — are a mix of ex-Trotskyists and general leftists. Were they to turn up for an SDA election, they’d kinda just be arrested or something, straight away. Their opponents in the recent elections, who have suggested that casual academics are getting a raw serve from the deals made in the COVID period, are a mix of new Trots, leftists and alternative lifestyle enthusiasts.

But one recent initiative has brought together old guard and vanguard (a vanguard is a device fitted by news site editors to screen out blatant labourist anti-green propaganda by columnists): a resolution, voted upon by the NTEU, to condemn the state of Israel as an apartheid entity oppressing the Palestinian people. The content of the resolution, which is long, and which I suspect some in the union would like to read out from a balcony over a square through loudspeakers, is not anything this writer would disagree with.

Part of the resolution (which I can’t find on the NTEU website) is proper: banning its members, as members, from accepting Israeli state-funded trips; opposing the adoption of policies prohibiting criticism of Israel, such as the new IHRA definition of anti-Semitism; and criticising university attempts to silence pro-Palestinian academics. But it also contains a great deal of editorialising on what Israel allegedly is, in a very specific interpretation of the Middle East.

That’s the sort of thing any militant union should be doing. Except, alas, the NTEU. Steelworkers, building workers, nurses, administrators, whatever. If its membership has substantial feelings on such an issue, the union should adopt it, even if it is not unanimous. But the NTEU, a union of academics, is a special case. It’s representing many people whose job is to have and profess opinions and judgments. Well-argued opinion, whatever that means, but opinion nonetheless. The most important thing it needs to represent, in protecting one aspect of its professional interests, is a commitment to absolute pluralism of ideas, and the protection of that in the workplace and wider society. 

That pluralism is compromised if the union takes relatively rigid positions on social and political issues. The Palestine resolution came after a long struggle over a proposed resolution on trans issues, which sought to condemn a certain type of reasoning — known as “gender critical” philosophy, which argues for the relative primacy of embodied sex over notions of self-determined gender — as “transphobic”. It didn’t get voted up and hasn’t been re-presented, to the best of my knowledge, but it will likely come around again.

The NTEU’s “special case” as a union should be obvious, but doesn’t appear to be. It may appear paradoxical that the union with the most left-wing active membership should stay well away from any resolutions with political content, but it’s essential not only to its capacity to offer universal protection to its members, but also to defend unrestrained free inquiry in a society where it is under numerous petty attacks, and may one day come under sustained, disabling attack. 

There is a strategic issue here, of course. You don’t want to load up a union of people who think and debate for a living with too many right-on resolutions, for the risk that it will eventually stir up an inert, middle section of the membership to form a campaign and take office-bearer positions. The union then becomes the site of an internal slugathon, simply to stop it being moved rightward altogether.

Memories of student unions — the Australian Union of Students (AUS) and the National Union of Students (NUS) — and the battles for control between political factions are fading now. But NTEU types should be aware of them, since some of them were involved, and this has been their whole life. (I know, reader, hearing this you now feel a little better about your own sad life. My gift to you.) 

But that is merely strategic. At the heart of political resolutions such as the Palestine one is a form of cynical reason that presents itself as principle. By simply using a union that one has power over to push this type of content, its advocates undermine the capacity to make a strong principled argument against universities that discipline or dismiss academics who “bring the institution into disrepute”. How is one to defend an academic like former Sydney Uni political economy academic Tim Anderson, who has a degree of enthusiasm for Assad’s Syria and North Korea, and compares Israel to the Nazis? 

If an academics’ union argues its right to have a set of fixed and concrete views on political matters, why should not a university argue the same? On what grounds could such an academics’ union contest it? For, in a way, the academics’ union is the university. The rest is just bricks, mortar and the insane ambitions of vice-chancellors. The university is a collection of scholars, dedicated to teaching and thought unbounded. Not only should the NTEU not have specific Palestine or transphobia resolutions, but it should even avoid the most basic resolutions that other unions might have about anti-racism and the like.

That is not because one might want to defend outright racist/racialist argument or teaching, most of which is going to fail basic tests of evidence. A university is not required to employ people doing bad, incompetent, mendacious or charlatan work. But there may be ideas and forms of argument — pro-borders, pro-monocultural, pro-nativist — which might be accused of racism in reasonable argument (that one is nevertheless not required to automatically accept). That academic deserves the full protection of their union, if they’re a member. 

To be honest, I very much doubt this will convince many of those drafting these resolutions, which includes a number of stalwart leftists. As regards the possibility that it might convince some of those most exercised over gender-critical philosophy, no chance. But for those from the left, in the union, who still believe that pluralism and unbounded inquiry are central to the pursuit of truth, and to the specific left project of human liberation, it is time to unsheath the plastic sword of Australian political argument, and once more into the breach dear friends, once more. Alright, that’s enough.