The Wire

A leader of the union covering mining and energy industries has told The Wire that talk of a split in the union movement on the carbon tax issue is nonsense. Last week a union official from South Australia was quoted as saying that some small towns in his state would become ghost towns if a carbon tax was implemented. Those comments were seized upon by the opposition leader Tony Abbott, who says that the tax will ‘wipe out jobs, big time’. The Wire spoke with Tony Maher, the president of the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union’s mining and energy division, asking him if union members were worried about Tony Abbott’s warning of job losses.