Reformers or Resisters? The State of Police Unionism in Australia

The ‘insider’ status of Australian police unions has contributed significantly to their success in improving the welfare and interests of police. Through interviews with senior police union leaders, this paper offers a police union officials’ perspective of how unions engage with governments and management to achieve their objectives. We ask, how do they see their role? How do they perceive the changing nature of policing? To what extent does their insider status constrain them? How are they adapting to the changing contours of a workplace under threat of change through reorganisation? In analysing these interviews, the paper suggests that Australian police unions are constrained in their progress by their ambiguity about their role, their conservative self-perceptions and their limited ambition to step outside the industrial sphere and embrace the changing world of policing.