Desperate Hockey's dossier
Joe Hockey and his staff have reportedly cyber-stalked hundreds of citizens concerned about the Howard Government's IR laws.
Using taxpayers' time and money, Joe Hockey and his staff have compiled a dossier about people who oppose WorkChoices, the article in The Australian reveals.
Read the article from Todays Australian:
Hockey accuses unions of 'stacking' campaign
By Brad Norington, The Australian
UNIONS have been accused of an orchestrated "stacking" campaign involving hundreds of letters published by national newspapers that attack the Howard Government but fail to declare they come from Labor-aligned union officials.
Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey yesterday claimed to have caught out a Labor Party-front group run by the ACTU openly boasting about stacking the pages of Australian newspapers over many months. Mr Hockey backed his claimed with a 20-page dossier containing details of letters published by newspapers from "union operatives posing as concerned community members''.
The identities of the letter writers were uncovered after Liberal Party staff conducted computer searches of the names. Mr Hockey's dossier lists 80 letters in recent months, but a "Your Rights at Work" website site run by the ACTU claims that 291 letters have been sent so far as part of a campaign target.
According to the minister, the ACTU's letter-writing campaign amounted to "trickery and deceit" and was endorsed by Kevin Rudd.
But ACTU secretary Jeff Lawrence described the letters as a democratic expression of outrage at the Coalition's workplace laws. He also questioned why Liberal Party officials would spend time tracking the identity of letter writers to newspapers. "Haven't they got better things to do?" he said.
ACTU official George Wright said Mr Hockey had spent $120million of taxpayers' money promoting the Coalition's workplace laws and his complaint about letters to newspapers was "ridiculous and childish''. Mr Wright said the letter writers had declared their interest when they wrote to newspapers.
"It appears that people opposed to the Government are being put in the same category as the worm -- you're not allowed to express your view publicly," he said.