The recent appearance of three new unions, competing for members with established unions in healthcare and education has raised some eyebrows, given they appear to be fronted by key figures of the anti-vaccine movement in Aotearoa and run out of Australia.
While the three have registered as official trade unions, none are part of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions.
As Stuff reports:
Key figures in the anti-vaccination movement are behind new unions for teachers, nurses and doctors – with substantial online recruitment campaigns saying they offer a much cheaper alternative to established unions.
The teacher’s group, named the Teachers’ Professional Association of New Zealand (TPANZ), has already run recruitment sessions in several senior school staff rooms.
However, members of the new unions would have to leave existing collective bargaining agreements and move to individually-negotiated contracts, as none of the groups have negotiating arrangements with the ministries of Education and Health.
The three groups have the backing of an Australian movement, ‘Red Unions’, which were denounced by the Australian Council of Trade Unions in 2021 as “fake unions”.
Stuff reported on the then unregistered Nurses Professional Association of New Zealand (NPANZ) in July 2023
The group is led by Nurses For Freedom founder Deborah Cunliffe, who publicly called for mandates for unvaccinated nurses to end. She was also a member of anti-vax group Voices For Freedom. The other union officers are Sarah Gilbertson and Saskia Rietveld.
The NPANZ website was registered in February by Jack McGuire, the director of Red Union Support Hub – an umbrella organisation overseeing 13 Australian unions that rode the fears of the vaccine mandates in 2021 to expand its membership.
Australian Council of Trade Unions Secretary Sally McManus, speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald in October 2021, described them as “fake unions”.
In Australia these “fake unions” are seen by many as nothing more than spoilers – set up to syphon members and funding away from established unions.
From The New Daily
The Red Union is making waves with some workers in Australia, but seemingly for all the wrong reasons.
Its members are quoted in the media as experts, and online ads promote the various associations as a cheap alternative to traditional unions, but this web of businesses has deep links to the Liberal-National Party (LNP) and the pseudo-legal conspiracy movement.
Launched by former LNP industrial relations chair Graeme Haycroft before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Red Union group has bolstered its ranks by recruiting a small and vocal portion of members from Queensland’s registered unions who opposed vaccine mandates and lockdowns.
Sky News, Channel 7, The Courier Mail and the ABC have all quoted Red Union members in 2023 in stories, elevating them as experts and advocates in digital and print media and television broadcasts.
Like any good astroturf organisation, they also act as campaign engines: In their words “no issue is too controversial for us”. There are parallels here with Voices for Freedom, the organisation that started out as anti-mandate, but has since latched onto a range of issues from free speech, to farmer protests.
These three new unions may have local anti-mandate front people but they are 100% Australian in origin.
TPANZ was registered last April as NZ Teachers United. Documents were filed by Queensland Association Services Group Pty, from an address in Bowen Hills, Brisbane, the base of Red Unions. The three unions’ postal address is a mail forwarding service in Parnell.
Spot the difference?
Queensland Association Services Group holds a 100% shareholding in NZPA Services Ltd. with a trading name of Unions NZ.
The directors of NZPA Services Ltd are Jack McGuire and Graeme Haycroft.
You may recall a few paragraphs back, Haycroft was one of the founders of the Red Union group. He is also a director of the Australian Institute for Progress (AIP).
AIP is described as:
From LittleSis.org
The Australian Institute for Progress (AIP) is a think tank organisation which undertakes research and advocacy on federal and state political issues. Most of the AIP Board is connected to the Liberal National Party, and according to its Executive Director, the AIP is ‘ideologically centre-right’, with its criticisms favouring right-wing political parties.
AIP took a strong “No” position in Australia’s Voice to Parliament referendum last year (see our reporting on the funding behind the Voice campaign).
And in a revelation that will probably surprise nobody at this point, AIP is an Atlas Network affiliate. The Atlas Network no longer displays their membership publicly, but the internet never forgets.
So we have astroturf unions being stood up by a director of an Australian Atlas-affiliated pro-mining and fossil fuel, anti climate-change think tank. Hopefully any doctor, nurse or teacher considering joining one of these “unions” thinks carefully about what they are getting into.
This report was assisted by a few people, but special thanks to Krissie_r on Twitter