Editorial: Highway To Help
After five weeks, five and half thousand kilometres, and 40 regional town meetings attended by thousands of regional workers, the bright orange Rights at Work bus has finally come to rest. Like the state's roads, there were good and bad moments, providing a real insight into the challenges and opportunities in building unionconnections in rural and regional communities.

<>Across the State we found working people engaged with the issue, particularly up on the north coast, where people put their hands up totake on the responsibility of leading local campaigns. Some of these campaigns had come off the back of months of ground work, others had sprung up recently but were buoyed by an enthusiasm and aresolve to stop the federal government's agenda. <>What was common was a thirst for information about the changes, deep-seated suspicions of the Howard Government's industrial relations agenda, and a special appreciation that the dilution of work rightswill undermine community structures.

Rural communities, more than the big cities, rely on their human capital, and speaker after speaker on the road trip made the point that changes to work were making it harder for them to commit regular time to communities. The unifying theme was that the loss of rights was yet another step in the State's walk away from regional Australia.

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http://workers.labor.net.au/282/editorial_editorial.html