At two o'clock on a Thursday afternoon in the middle of July, the workers who run the largest iron ore terminal on earth put down their tools and walked to the gate. Their families came with them. For eight hours the busiest wharf in the country went quiet, and for the first time in twenty six years the ore stopped moving through Port Hedland.

By the evening, some of the most powerful people in the country were calling it a threat to the nation. They were half right; something was being threatened that afternoon. But it was not the nation.

The case for building outside Labor does not rest on the idea that Labor has drifted, or sold out, or lost its way, or fallen into the wrong hands. All of those stories imply there was once a golden age, a true Labor Party that could be restored by better people with better values. The history does not support that. The claim made here is harder and more useful, from its first decade, the Labor Party's actual function has been to take the energy of the organised working class and channel it into forms the existing system can absorb. It does not fail at representing workers. It succeeds at managing them. Once you see this, a century of apparent betrayals stops looking like a series of accidents and starts looking like a machine doing its job.

Ask most Australians what a Republic means and they will tell you it means getting rid of the King. That is part of it, but it is the smallest part. If that was all a republic meant, it would barely be worth the effort. Swapping a king for a president and changing the letterhead on government buildings would not change a single thing about how this country actually works, who owns it, or who gets a say in running it.