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"They did everything they could to shackle, weaken and destroy the union movement and other progressive sections of civil society," writes John Falzon.

Solidarity, and the unity it begets, is the greatest threat to the neoliberal agenda of unfettered profiteering coupled with unconscionable privation and deliberate disempowerment. It is, on the one side, the face of human suffering, and on the other, the face of human greed. It was an assault on the practice of solidarity, an attack on the tenderness of the people. Our new comment platform requires only one log-in to access articles and to join the discussion on The Canberra Times website. This was what lay at the heart of that "hyper-aggression towards and demonising of unions." It is the face of the worker who is unable to find a job and is therefore waging a daily battle from below the poverty line, with no immediate prospect of a JobSeeker increase. Rising prices, rising profits, declining wages (both in relation to the cost of living and as a proportion of national income) and inadequate social infrastructure, are all of a piece, all cut from the same heavy neoliberal cloth. At the heart of the neoliberal project though is what the four blokes in Toorak sought to orchestrate with extreme prejudice, namely the atomisation, the fragmentation, the dis-organisation of the working class. It is the face of the worker who, despite being in paid work, cannot afford a place to live for herself and her children. What it looks like is for the first time... In that year, Gerard Henderson, a soon to be staffer to John Howard, wrote an article attacking the system of co-operation between employers and unions. What it looks like is people can't pay the bills now.