More strikes ‘inevitable’ in NSW as government ramps up anti-union rhetoric

The New South Wales transport minister, David Elliott, started Monday on a rhetorical cliff and kept walking.

On Sydney radio station 2GB, Elliott described industrial action taken by the state's rail workers as "terrorist-like activity", then accused the Rail, Tram and Bus Union of acting like "cowards", spreading "bullshit" and "hijacking the city".

At a hastily arranged media conference a few hours later, he effectively accused union members of seeking to change the government. The industrial action taken by the rail union was designed to "bully the electorate" into voting for Labor, as well as "disrupt the recovery from Covid", he said.

Elliott was not alone. The prime minister, Scott Morrison, weighed in, also on 2GB, to condemn the "strike", while the NSW premier, Dominic Perrottet, described the action as a "coordinated attack by the Labor party and the union movement".

Labor and the union movement, Perrottet said, were "in bed with each other to cause mass destruction in our city and our states".

The union flatly rejected the government's description of their industrial action as a "strike", calling it a "low level" measure that wouldn't have affected services. As the day went on it became clear the government had taken the extraordinary step of closing down the transport network because it had "misinterpreted" an agreement it struck with the union during negotiations over the weekend.

Workers had turned up for their shifts on Monday to find they had been locked out by the transport department. "The NSW government is spitting the dummy and trying to make a point," the RTBU secretary, Alex Claassens, said.