A failure to engage?: Trade unions and industrial regeneration on the north west coast of Tasmania

Trade unions often have a long history in industrial regions, in Australian-based energy production, mining, forestry and other related resource based industries.They organise and represent their members often in relatively economically effective ways, developing locallybased union confederations as Trades and Labour Councils. However, with the embrace of neo-liberal political agenda, governments have begun to deal and in some cases promote a deindustrialisation of these regions. Multinationals corporations have begun to withdraw from these regions, and state bodies have often been privatised. In addition, contentious environmental politics have developed in the forestry and timber resource areas. One danger for labour and their unions in this process is that they become objects of policy, victims of policies, in which they have little part. The purpose of this paper is to explore how labour becomes a victim in such processes and concurrently the ways that unions struggle to develop their capacities and focus their purpose to address these changes in active and engaged ways. These themes are brought out with a study of the North West Tasmanian region.