Will you join us to Stand Up for the Burrup?

WE RECALL the Pilbara Strike of 1946-49, when 200 Pilbara LawMen asked three leaders – Clancy McKenna, Don McLeod, and Dooley Bin Bin – to organise a strike and walk-off by Aboriginal workers and their families for land – our Own Land – and for wages, not rations.

WE RECALL that our people won that strike after Waterside Workers Federation and Seamen’s Union members refused to load or transport the pastoralists’ wool until they settled with our strike leaders.

WE RECALL also the Great Strikes of the 1890’s, beginning with the Shearers Strike of 1891, when the Shearers Union members, like our people, struggled against pastoralists backed by police and courts.

IN 2012, OUR DEMAND is for UNESCO World Heritage Listing for our ancient sacred rock art at Murujuga/the Dampier Archipelago, the world’s oldest and largest rock art landscape.

ON SATURDAY 2 JUNE AND SUNDAY 3 JUNE 2012, we ask trade unionists throughout Australia to once again Stand Up with us and help us win our just demand.

Please circulate.
First join the Facebook campaign https://www.facebook.com/StandUpForTheBurrup

Then in Darwin we will be assembling for photos outside of Parliament House. Stand by….
More information

http://tracker.org.au/2011/09/the-contrarian-leading-the-way-the-pilbara-strike/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1946_Pilbara_strike/wiki/1946_Pilbara_strike

by Rob Durbridge

The crisis besetting the Federal Government looks like a rising Queensland flood, while Abbott and Co watch and wait for the Government to drown.

It’s a crisis with multiple causes, linked by the failure of a leadership without a sense of identity or direction.

The undoubted achievements of the Government are submerged by short term opportunism, capitulation to the powerful at the expense of progressive support and an inability to communicate effectively.

However, this is all its own doing as the Abbott Opposition does not command much popular support either; from them there are no big ideas for reform, just more neo-liberal slogans and anti-union plans.

The one positive in this is that despite everything, Labor and the Greens could still win a majority next year.

It’s a long shot but,building on the blocks of the Carbon Price and its progressive compensation package, the NBN, and the Equal Pay commitment to community workers, a platform of social, environmental and economic reforms could still defeat the Coalition’s plans for greater inequality and disadvantage.

Instead of making concessions to corporations who will never repay the favour, take the concessions away from them so they pay their way like the good citizens they claim to be.

If the ALP wants the electorate to start listening, start saying things the majority wants to hear; public nation-building projects to stimulate growth, create jobs and protect the environment protection like fast rail, renewable energy sources and a publicly-owned and modernized energy sector.

Instead of becoming fixated on the budget surplus, how about building quality public services like education and health with the taxation base to do it? The increasing fragility of the prospects for growth may well demand further economic initiatives after May.

The ALP needs internal reform to allow adopted policies and members’ views to prevail and the restoration of caucus democracy so that isolation of the Government from the community can be addressed. Instead of blaming the Greens for the plight of the ALP, ask why it is that the Greens have won the progressive constituency where ideas count and swing votes.

The Greens have found articulate and knowledgeable leaders who are able to communicate the issues effectively while the ALP lurches from crisis to crisis alternating between denial and ultimate policy concessions which win no new support.

Withdrawal from the war-without-mandate in Afghanistan is an example; costing billions, lives and life-long disabilities for purposes never explained and then ended, but not ended with SAS units to continue indefinitely. US bases that are not bases but ‘joint facilities’, drones being launched from Australian territory and billions to be spent on submarines and aircraft for the privilege of the US alliance just don’t add up. Who are we arming against again?

The Carbon Tax is another – something which could be a key building block for the new economy which is now being downplayed and blamed on the Greens while renewable energy is downgraded in favour of more coal and gas exploitation. When it is known that the compensation is real, the costs are minimal for households and the sky has not fallen in, the Coalition’s scare campaign could be neutralized.

Instead of sulking about the success of the Greens, and prophesying doom with Bob Brown’s departure, the ALP should accept that Milne’s team will be vital to regaining government and act accordingly. One way would be to make Bandt the Minister for Energy, replacing the corporations’ favourite son.

Short of that, a reform program which distinguishes Labor from the Coalition and joins the Greens in building a coherent vision for a more just and sustainable Australia would reach traditional and new ALP voters. Leaders who can articulate and reach voters who are sick of spin and manipulation is another necessity. The ALP of all parties knows that its first duty is to win elections and to find the people who can do it.

The Greens new leadership in Christine Milne and Adam Bandt will see the party maintain its vote and reach out to more traditional labour voters in unions and social movements beyond the environment. Marriage equality and all the issues which relate to it, rights for workers to organise beyond the half-finished repeal of Work Choices, ending the demonization of refugees, the unemployed and Indigenous people are all part of the Greens future.

Christine Milne began the leadership of the Greens with a stellar performance which illustrated her command of the economic and environmental issues facing the nation. With a background as a community activist and state politician she has experience in government with both major parties as well as their hostility and ruthlessness.

Of all Federal politicians she has shown her knowledge and ability and is respected internationally for her political and community campaigns against harmful emissions. The Greens’ near 20% primary vote in the recent Queensland by-election shows that predictions of the party’s demise are premature.

Both the Greens and the ALP will continue to compete, particularly in inner-city electorates, but both parties also need to recognize that sitting on cross benches does not achieve much in the way of reform; together they can win government but apart they will be on the sidelines.

The immediate challenge for the two parties is whether or not to exchange preferences in Deputy Leader Bandt’s seat of Melbourne. For its part the Coalition is likely to not preference the Greens as they showed in the 2011 Victorian state poll.

This is a challenge to both the ALP and the Greens, but it is also symbolic of the wider challenge for the two anti-Coalition parties.

- Rob Durbridge, SEARCH President

http://www.search.org.au/archives/3112

Unions will seek a $26 a week pay rise for Australia’s lowest paid workers in 2012, whose wages have fallen well behind average income earners over the past decade and are not keeping pace with the cost of living.

The ACTU will today lodge its submission to Fair Work Australia’s annual wage review to increase the award wage for the lowest paid workers to $615.30 per week.

This would mean a 68c/hour increase from $15.51 per hour to $16.19 per hour. For other award-reliant workers above the benchmark tradesperson’s rate, unions will seek a 3.8% pay increase.

ACTU Secretary Jeff Lawrence said it was time for an increase that stopped the gap between low-paid workers and other workers from growing further.

“The 1.4 million workers on award wages – one in six workers – can barely meet the cost of living let alone live comfortably in an economy that is the envy of the developed world,” Mr Lawrence said.

“It is grossly unfair that minimum wages have fallen further and further behind average wages. The purchasing power of minimum wages is now also below the level it was in 2005.

“The wage increases awarded in 2010 and 2011 have stopped minimum wage workers from falling further behind. It’s time to make up the ground that was lost under WorkChoices.”

Mr Lawrence said that while the National Minimum Wage had more or less kept pace with overall wages growth in the early 2000s, low-paid workers had lost ground under Work Choices.

Since mid-2005, overall wages have risen by 27.5%, while the NMW has gone up by 21.7%. The benchmark tradesperson’s award rate has risen by only 18.7% over the same period.

Mr Lawrence said that if the National Minimum Wage had kept pace with overall wages growth since 2005, it would now be $617.50 per week. Instead it’s just $589.30 per week.

Mr Lawrence said unions were seeking a $26 a week increase in the National Minimum Wage and in other award minimum wages up to the benchmark tradesperson’s rate, equal to a 4.4% increase. Unions are seeking a 3.8% increase for other award workers.

“Minimum wage workers are the backbone of the economy. They are the people who clean our schools and shopping centres, serve us in hotels, who take care of our elderly and our children. These are people we cannot live without, yet their value is not reflected in their pay packets. We must ensure they are not forgotten.

“An extra $26 a week is modest and affordable, but will make a difference to the lives of minimum wage workers and their families. Over the past year they have shouldered large price rises for fruit and vegetables, fuel, electricity, water, and education and childcare.

“This is money they will spend on food, clothes, fuel and other necessities in the main streets of every Australian suburb and town.”

Contact Details
Rebecca Tucker
Ph: 0408 031 269

About 100 unionists packed the Unions NSW Atrium on May 14 to discuss the right to strike campaign, at a fringe event of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) Congress that began the same day.

Titled “Advance Australia Fair? Australian jobs and the right to strike”, the forum was sponsored by the Victorian Trades Hall Council. VTHC secretary Brian Boyd said it had not generally sponsored or organised ACTU fringe events, but this campaign warranted it.

The VTHC launched the Right to Strike campaign after it was first raised at the December 2010 Union and Community Summer School.

The forum was opened by Unions NSW secretary Mark Lennon, who said that in NSW “there is no right to strike … and with Barry O’Farrell’s new laws, there is no right for unions to even affiliate to a political party of their choice any longer in NSW”.

Victorian Electrical Trades Union secretary Dean Mighell discussed what was happening to jobs of his members while their ability to take industrial action was restricted. “Jobs are being offshored to Mexico, where capital can get cheaper labour costs … Free trade is cut-throat.” He said the current mining boom was concerning: “We need to think beyond the quarry.”

ACTU president Ged Kearney discussed the union movement’s campaign around insecure work, and said the right to strike is a fundamental right.

Len Cooper, Victorian secretary of the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union said: “We live in a country that is described as democratic – yet the basics of international labour laws are excluding both federal and state law.

“This is not a small issue – this affects 11 million workers. This is about the right to strike, the right to picket, the right to take solidarity action.”

Cooper said that in the capitalist crisis, many militant unionists were being sacked or seeing their jobs outsourced or offshored.

We need to defend the right to strike. And the right to strike will only be won by striking,” he said to cheers from the crowd.

Chris White, former secretary of the South Australian Trades and Labour Council and a union activist for 30 years, told the meeting that all penal powers needed to be repealed, including “all restrictions in Fair Work Australia that were adopted word-for-word from Work Choices”.

“The right to strike should not mean having to go to a commission, giving three days notice so that employers get forewarning to make contingencies to undermine workers’ industrial action. It should just be about a meeting of workers making a decision collectively.”

White also called for the abolition of the Australian Building and Construction Commission completely, not just in name.

White said the importance of striking should not be limited to economic interests: “Unions should be able to take solidarity strikes. In the past, when Indonesia was committing genocide in East Timor, we used to be able to strike to support the people of East Timor.”

He also said the question of workers’ control and self-management needs to be on the agenda. “Workers can control our own economy without capitalists.”

In discussion, South Coast Labour Council secretary Arthur Rorris spoke strongly in favour of the campaign, saying it shouldn’t be a fringe event, and “the right to strike is the main game. Capital can strike, and we should be able to as well. If you don’t have the right to withdraw labour, you are a slave.”

Geelong Trades Hall Secretary Tim Gooden said the campaign needed to spread. He said unions should not be allowed to be picked off, but build a fighting alliance together to push the right to strike.

Gooden said the experience of unions in the Clarrie OShea case in 1969 showed that the battle to free O’Shea, who was jailed for striking, was not a short one, but a campaign built over years.

Susan Price, branch secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union at the University of NSW, said attendees should sign on to a joint statement in support of the right to strike campaign that was initiated in NSW. Many rank-and-file and union leaders had pledged support.

Initial NSW signatories to the statement include veteran trade unionist Fred Moore; assistant national secretary of the MUA Warren Smith, deputy branch secretary of the MUA in Sydney Paul Keating, NSW state secretary of the CFMEU Brian Parker, University of NSW branch secretary of the NTEU Susan Price, Sydney University branch secretary of the NTEU Michael Thomson, and state councillor of NSW Teachers Federation John Gauci.

The ACTU Congress voted on a 釘etter Bargaining Policy・ that included “restoring an effective right to strike”. This policy notes that the International Labour Organisation has described Fair Work Australia’s regulation of industrial action as 兎xcessive・ and calls for industrial action to be available without a secret ballot. The policy also calls for bosses to have to give three days notice for lockouts and not be able to use replacement labour during industrial action. It also demands an end to the outlawing of pattern bargaining, and for an end to workers or their unions facing coercive or punitive court orders from industrial action, unless Fair Work Australia has ordered an end to the industrial action.

[To sign the right to strike statement or for more information, contact Susan Price on 0400 320 602 or pricesusan9@gmail.com.]
From GLW
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/51070

The campaign is called Better Jobs 4 Better Chicken and you can follow it here

http://www.betterjobsbetterchicken.org.au

by Humphrey McQueen

For months, the bosses, their stenographers in the mass media and their political agents have been publicising corruption in the East Branch of the Health Services Union to tar the whole of the labour movement.

The responses from the Killard government and the ACTU have been as tardy as they have been lame. The best their leaders can mouth is that the HSU is the one rotten apple. This apologetic line is the latest instance of how organised labour is on the back foot.

The most obvious example of this retreat has been in regard to the Australian Building and Construction Commission where the Construction Division of the CFMEU has never taken the fight up to the bosses by focusing on their ‘ingrained culture’ of criminality. Too often the union pleads: ‘we’re not as thuggish as they say we are’.
The union is vigorous in attacking OH&S violations and detailing non-payment of wages, Super and taxes, But these offences are confined to the workplace and don’t help the populace to see the nature of capitalism.

Exploitation is not theft

Before documenting a few recent instances from the avalanche of the activities considered crimes even by the standards of bourgeois justice, it is vital to be clear about how the capitalist system works.

All the money that capitalists steal from each other and swindle out of governments and the public comes from the surplus value added by wage-slaves.

That exploitation is not theft. On average, capitalists pay wage-slaves the full value of the cost of producing the one commodity – their labour-power – that we have for sale.

That exchange is the core of capitalism. Once that surplus value has been produced, sections of capital battle to get their hands on as much of it as possible. That is where the most of the swindling comes in. In some cases, the original capitalist can be left with no profit. No commentator on the accumulation of capital has paid as much attention to swindling as did Marx who nonetheless kept it in its place.

Construction

Collusive tendering and price-fixing are the ‘ingrained culture’ of the employers in this sector. In 1995, Leighton’s then CEO, Wal King, justified his company’s use of false invoices to conceal price-fixing on the Sydney Casino as ‘the culture … and custom that had been long-standing in the industry that had been handed on for years.’ So had King’s excuse.

In 1911, the NSW MBA justified its members’ involvement in illegal commissions by saying that they ‘should be openly recognised’ as ‘universal and worldwide’.

The 1995 report branded King and Leightons as ‘not of good repute, having regard to character, honesty and integrity’. Despite this, he and Leightons continued to flourish.

They were not banned from sites, unlike CFMEU organisers defending the lives of their members.

The NSW Gyles Royal Commission in 1990 forced the resignation of the executive of the NSW MBA which had been a clearing house for collusive tenders. This unanticipated outcome was similar to that from the Royal Commission into the Ship Painters and Dockers which had exposed bottom-of-the harbor schemes across the big end of town.
Howard did not make that mistake in setting the terms of reference for the Cole inquisition into the building and construction unions.

Killard followed suit when she excluded health and safety from the review of the ABCC, which thereby had an easy time in finding that her ‘tough cop on the beat’ was necessary.

The gravest matter in building and construction is the Hardie Asbestos case. The High Court endorsed the disbarring of its directors for seven years for rigging the books about the compensation fund. There is no chance of their being charged with complicity in the mass murder of workers since, under capitalism, killing is not murder when done for profit.

In April, Lend Lease was made to pay fines and restitution of $54USm. for ten years of ‘a systematic pattern of audacious fraud’ in the US of A. Yet again, the company’s defence was ‘everyone does it’. Yet again, Lend Lease is allowed to tender for government contracts.

Funny money

John Gay, former head at Gunns in Tasmania, has been charged on two counts of insider trading late in 2011. It is alleged that he sold shares in Gunns knowing that funds for its pulp mill were not going forthcoming.
In the same week as Gay faced court on 14 May, the Securities Commission (ASIC) reported a boom in insider-trading, with as many as 200 alerts received every day, that is, some 50,000 a year. The authorities managed to get eleven convictions in the three years to December, a slight improvement over their ten successes in the decade before 2008. The financialisation of the economy has inserted multiple levels of intermediaries with access to advance information about company accounts. The disproportion of alerts to convictions is a measure of how light is the hand of the law on corporate crooks.

The shopping center giant Centro lost track of more than $3 billion and thereby misled shareholders in 2007. A judge fined its Chief Financial Officer $30,000 and disqualified him for two years. In delivering his findings, his honour warned off ASIC by ruling that the Centro board had not been personally dishonest. Indeed, they had been ‘intelligent, conscientious and well-advised’. Perhaps if they had been stupid, lazy and ignorant they would not have lost anything? We might compare the court’s kid-glove treatment of Centro’s bosses with what its managers would have done to an honest, intelligent, conscientious and well-advised shopkeeper who happened to lose track of even $3,000 in unpaid rents.

Much smaller in one sense yet also far larger in its implication is the plundering of Super fund Trio by its executives. Alongside the Wollongong battlers whose losses were covered by government guarantees were several hundred leafy North Shore investors who went for Trio’s self-managed funds because they promised higher returns. Where did those ‘victims’ think the extra spondoolicks were going to come from if not from shonky deals such as Trio’s transferring $124m. to a tax haven?

The problem is not the individual rip-off merchant or a few greedy Pymble millionaires, but the institutionalisation of tax havens with the connivance of governments across the globe.
ASIC recently fined Leightons $300,000 for non-disclosure of information to the stock exchange. That is a hanging offence because they were ripping off other capitalists. A fine for killing for profit can be as little as $35,000. Bourgeois justice values a worker’s life at one-eighth of a share-holder’s monetary loss.

Bribes
Leighton’s is also under investigation here and in Iraq into whether one of its subsidiaries paid bribes to get information to win a contract with South Oil Co.

Queensland ex-Minister Gordon Nuttall is in jail for taking bribes from mining magnate Ken Talbot. Talbot was due to stand trial on thirty-five charges of corruption but died in a plane crash between Cameroon and the Congo, two of the most corrupt countries on that continent. You can bet your bottom dollar that Talbot had been as generous to the thugs ruling over those mines as he was to Nuttall. Perhaps his plane crashed because it was overloaded with gifts.

In the wake of the Wheat Board’s bribery in Iraq, the Reserve Bank of Australia got around to cleaning up its act.

Between 2001 and 2009, two subsidiaries, Note Printing Australia and Securency, paid $50m. to agents to win contracts to supply plasticised bank notes. How much of this payout ended up bribing officials in places like Nepal? How much did the RBA oard know, and when did they know it?

On 4 April this year, thirty Victorian building inspectors were charged with ‘alleged corruption, serious misconduct and harassment’; they allegedly took kickbacks to block formal investigations. On the same day, the State government announced the formation of its own Construction Stasi to ban the flying of the Eureka flag on sites. There will be no special police to investigate who bribed the inspectors.

Killing no murder

Four trucking companies are up on 1,000 charges of disabling the speed governors on their trucks. The practice came to light after a truck killed three people in January. In the aftermath, NSW police found that scores of governors at four firms had been tampered with.

The Transport Workers’ Union repeated its accusation against Coles and Woolworths for imposing unsafe delivery schedules. For proof, stop at the Truckies’ memorial at Tarcutta. The employers’ association defence is that executives sit in offices and don’t sully their suits by tinkering with accelerators. Hence, any blame rests with the drivers. At law, corporations don’t have a soul to condemn or a backside to kick, yet they seem well supplied with arseholes.

Price-fixing

One QANTAS executive in the US went to gaol for eight months in 2008 for colluding with competitors to fix freight rates.

Qantas has also been fined by the European Commission, the New Zealand authorities and paid $26m. in penalties early last year in the US of A. If Qantas bosses were indigenous lads in Western Australia they would be behind bars under the three-strikes-and-you’re-in rule.

Dick Pratt made a name for himself as a philanthropist before the Competition Commission fined him $36m. for price-fixing. By colluding on the price of cardboard cartons, Pratt’s Visy and rival Amcor stole money from every pensioner who bought a packet of corn-flakes. Out of that rip-off of the most vulnerable, Pratt made a big fellow of himself.

It is typical of the ingrained culture of capitalism that his associates said that the head of the Competition Commission, Gordon Samuel, had behaved badly in pursuing the case because he had been a guest at Pratt’s house.

Prime Minister Rudd knew about the scam yet flew to the funeral to pay homage to one of the biggest crooks yet to be exposed in Australia.
Transfield’s co-founder, Franco Belgiorno-Nettis, subsidised the visual arts out of the profits he made from exploiting workers while swindling customers and governments. He confessed to his corporation’s official historian that he had engaged in corruption and strong-arm tactics: ‘We cover this with a veneer of civilization.’ In a class society, each act of civilisation is met by a piece of barbarism exacted from workers whose creativity and suffering pay for the benefactor’s noble gestures.

Activists must voice class bitterness and class contempt.

We lose by cringing before bad behaviour in one union.

Instead, we must go straight for the corporate jugular to publicise organised robbers and serial killers.

Dickens got it half wrong in Bleak House when he has detective Bucket observe that, while murder could be done by amateurs, thieving needed professionals.

Dickens was right to foresee that Pratt did not wake up one morning after a blameless career in business and decide to steal tens of millions of dollars. He was a professional thief. Moreover, killing for profit is no work for amateurs as asbestos makes clear.

An International Class-War Crimes Tribunal would charge the Hardie executives with ‘prole-cide’.

The ashes of Joe Hill

Let’s start from three interlocked expressions of the IWW’s approach to educating, organising and agitating: its humour, its slogans and its songs.

In comparison, today’s grouplets, including the IWW, seem po-faced.

The first aspect is the power of IWW satire, sarcasm and irony. We remember jokes and repeat them in ways we don’t with the best argued ideas. On slogans, ‘Fast Workers Die Young’ is still going the rounds when not many Marxist scholars can define universal labour-time.

Tom Barker was gaoled in 1915 for a headline in Direct Action to counter wartime recruiting: ‘Your Country Needs You: Workers, Follow Your Masters.’

Similarly, we remember snatches of IWW songs because they are witty and because we sing them together.

The whole of a May Day march should be a massed choir. ‘Bump me into parliament’ to ‘Pie in the Sky’ circulated long after speeches and manifestos were forgotten.

The second weapon in the Wobblies’ armoury was ‘Propaganda by deed’.

My father and his workmates at a Brisbane tannery joined a union in 1917 after a Canadian seaman Wobbly king-hit the foreman. The workers had never seen anyone stand up to the boss. Of course, the effectiveness of that blow was increased because it took place during a revolutionary upsurge around the world.

Propaganda by deed is not just the one-off punch but involves building up strength in the workplace by initiating a campaign for a winnable demand that has broad support, for a shithouse or potable water on site.

That is the way to recruit and to keep those who join active once they pay their union dues.

Read the whole article here

http://workersbushtelegraph.com.au/2012/05/11/iww-then-and-now/

joe hill

Australian unions have endorsed the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) support for co-operative operations, recognising the critical role they play in advancing the organisation’s Global Employment Agenda and promoting decent work.

ACTU President Ged Kearney said the 2012 ACTU Congress had endorsed the position in support of co-operatives as they had a proven record of creating and sustaining employment, now providing more than 100 million jobs globally.

“Co-operatives have also been more resilient to the deepening global economic and jobs crisis than other sectors,” Ms Kearney said.

“Trade unions and co-operatives have a long association in this country. Industry based credit unions gave workers access to financial services and loans, and co-operatives provided affordable services for key workers such as childcare, housing and health.”

The motion adopted at the Congress supports the ILO’ position on co-operatives, outlined in Recommendation 193.

The resolution acknowledges the importance of co-operatives in job creation, mobilising resources and generating investment, as well as their promotion of economic and social development to the benefit of their members.

Ms Kearney said a good example of how co-operatives fostered decent work was Earthworker Co-operative, a micro-financing venture aimed at resourcing manufacturing start-ups including Eureka’s Future Workers Cooperative destined for Morwell, Victoria.

Earthworker Co-operative project officer Dave Kerin said that as future jobs began to disappear out of the power industry, it made sense that co-operatives had higher productivity and better work environments as employees were co-owners.

The Eureka Future Workers Cooperative, which starts manufacturing of its solar hot water units in Knox, Victoria, in July, was the first of a series of union-based worker-owned renewables manufacturing businesses to be rolled out across the nation.

Factories are planned in the Hunter region in NSW, Geelong and WA. The model is unique because of a distribution system where units will be purchased through the wages component of the enterprise agreements negotiated between unions and companies with incentives paid out of rebates.

“Australia’s International Year of Co-operatives Secretariat now seeks to partner with the ACTU to progress the development of a strong social sector of the Australian economy,” said Melina Morrison, Director of the International Year of Co-operatives Secretariat.

“Trade unions and co-operatives share sustainable employment agendas.”

The ACTU Congress backing of the resolution follows the introduction last week of new national co-operatives legislation which aims to strengthen the sector by removing restrictions on co-operatives doing business in other states and territories.