Well, you have to hand it to John Howard. WorkChoices, his hand-crafted legislation aimed at reducing your rights at work and removing unions from the work, has never polled very well. While governments that have been in power as long as his build up a lot of baggage, he has been largely impervious to the community reaction to WorkChoices and its negative implications for employees. Even the "fairness test", grudgingly introduced earlier this year despite the Government asserting that the system was already fair, provides abundant evidence of the sort of dreadful AWAs that employees are being asked to sign.

This is today's front-page in the Sydney Morning Herald. You can tell a lot about an election campaign by how political leaders are portrayed in the photos that the media prints. This photo is a ripper. The boss might like WorkChoices but it's very, very obvious that the six blokes standing to the side of the Prime Minister clearly don't. It's not hard to imagine who those blokes are not going to vote for on Saturday.

depa is not affiliated to any political party. As Secretary of the union, I am not a member of a political party either. I was a member of the ALP from 1970 to 2005, just so you know we’re being completely honest here. Historically, we have always expressed a view prior to New South Wales State elections because generally the political choice has had an impact on employment laws, local government, environmental and development control legislation. We illustrated our attitude in the most recent State election with an image of Tweedledum and Tweedledee from Alice in Wonderland. Not much of a choice but at least we liked the attitude of the NSW Government opposing the introduction of WorkChoices in local government.

The changes introduced with WorkChoices are designed to take from employees, like you lot employed in local government in New South Wales, the rights and protections you have historically enjoyed under awards, industrial agreements or enterprise agreements through the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission. We've made it clear since March 2006 when WorkChoices began that we oppose this. We don't think a system aimed at making Australia competitive internationally by reducing the cost of labour works, because it is unfair to those people who provide that labour.

But now, with only three days to go until we all get the chance to express our view about WorkChoices and everything else, we need to remind you that we still don't like it.

There are plenty of reasons to vote governments in and governments out and we take this opportunity to remind you that if your rights at work are important to you, if you want depa to be able to act to protect and advance your interests, then we can do that much, much better under a change of government. We would like to remain untroubled by Federal legislation aimed at reducing your rights at work and our ability to represent your interests.

We would prefer to do that in the New South Wales system and the chances of remaining in the New South Wales system are better if the government changes.

We don't like individual contracts and never have. We have had a long history in fighting off individual term contracts when they were first raised as possibilities in the draft exposure Bill for a new Local Government Act in 1991. We were instrumental in having the 1994 amendment carried which reduced the numbers of "senior staff" under the 1993 Act - one of our great achievements was having the three Independents in the Lower House support an amendment to restrict senior staff to salary levels above the entry-level in the New South Wales Public Service SES. Not bad to be able in roll the Government on that one.

We think term contracts create an artificial and episodic nature in employment which should be continuous and also make it easier for employers to sack workers who are doing a good job. WorkChoices raises the possibility that everyone can be placed on an individual AWA. We think that is a terrible future.

While the Prime Minister might boast that if his Government is returned to power on Saturday, WorkChoices would become "part of the furniture", we see a different picture. It may well become part of the furniture but not the nice comfortable chair everyone wants to sit in but the worn out old chair everyone avoids because it is unsafe and uncomfortable and which will be put on the kerb at the next council cleanup.

It would be surprising if any members were alarmed at the content of this advice. Whether you are a union official like me, a member of the Committee of Management or a union member, we have all been demonised as union extremists, union bosses or union fanatics in this campaign. Gee, they really hate unions and they really hate people who choose to belong to them. People like you.

We know that some members will choose to vote for Prime Minister Howard and his Government on Saturday and that is, of course, your right. But if you do and the Government is re-elected, when the zealot from HR offers you an AWA to sign that reduces your entitlements and the quality of your life, you won't be able to complain that we didn't warn you.

We’re all sick of the campaign and Saturday can't come soon enough. At the Australian Super Investors Conference in September, the chief economist at one of Australia's largest fund managers thought it ludicrous that anyone would consider voting one way or another based on what could or could not happen to the economy. That fund manager believed that inflation would remain at or below 3% regardless of who was elected and he thought there were so many better reasons to elect someone or to remove someone than the issue of the economy largely run independent of the Government.

Ian Robertson

Secretary