Is this the start of a youthful change within Australia’s largest union?

Or just a noisy morning blip on a media landscape crowded with murders and racism.

On Thursday morning about 20 young people university students, shop workers, school students and retail industry employees – protested outside the offices of the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees union on St Paul’s Terrace at Spring Hill.

Some of the young workers, speakers Duncan Hart, 23, and Carl Jackson, 21, are SDA shop stewards for some of the biggest retail businesses in Brisbane.

Their main gripe is that their union does not reflect their views on gay marriage.

The young people outside the union’s Queensland branch wants to know what the link is between their union in 2013 and a religious group called the Ambrose Society for Religious Liberty which runs anti-gay marriage lectures for SDA shop organisers.

Carl Jackson said his union did not represent his views and news of the link shocked him.

“They are a very conservative, right wing union and as soon as I heard about this I thought this was an area where we could assert ourselves as members, and really take the leadership to task and make them more accountable to the membership” Mr Jackson said.

University student Rebecca Barrigos questioned the right of union leader 64-year-old Joe de Bruyn, who has been in charge since 1978, to tell her friends what to think about the issue.

Kat Henderson, who represents a young lobby group called Equal Love, told the protesters 80 per cent of young Australians wanted gay marriage legalised.

“And it makes perfect bloody sense because young people have no interest in homophobia,” she said.

Chris Ketter, the SDA’s secretary since 1996 and Labor’s number one senate ticket holder for the 2013 federal election, was presenting the SDA’s case against young workers paying for paid parking at Brisbane shopping centres on Thursday and was not at the protest.

He did not return calls from Fairfax Media.

Photo: Tony Moore
Author: Tony Moore
Publication: Brisbane Times
Publication date: May 30 2013