The Australian Council of Trade Unions has warned the Abbott government to expect a disruptive political campaign from the union movement at the 2016 federal election, claiming unions are "still here and we're not going anywhere."
Dave Oliver, ACTU secretary, said on Wednesday he has identified 32 marginal seats across Australia that the ACTU will target at the coming federal election, due next year.
He is recruiting more than 20 full-time organisers to run "on-the-ground activities" similar to those that were "so effective" in key marginal seats in Victoria and Queensland during recent state elections, he says.
Speaking at the National Press Club in Canberra, Mr Oliver said the Abbott government's decision to set up the Heydon Royal Commission into the union movement after it was elected was a "political witch hunt" that has wasted tens of millions of taxpayers' dollars.
He says the Coalition learned after losing the Work Choices battle that to attack workers' rights and conditions successfully it first needed to take unions out of the picture, so that is why it set up the royal commission.
"So immediately upon being elected this time, they put into action a plan to weaken, distract, neuter - and if possible - sideline our movement," Mr Oliver said on Wednesday.
"Every conservative government since Billy McMahon has called a royal commission into unions. It's standard operating practice for the Coalition ... but governments come and go."
Mr Oliver's warning comes just three weeks before the ACTU's triennial Congress, at which he plans to put himself forward for another term as ACTU secretary.
Ged Kearney will be putting herself forward for re-election as ACTU president at the Congress.
Mr Oliver said on Wednesday that the union movement ought to "come together again under one umbrella" as a high-profile campaigning movement "with the ACTU at its peak".
He also criticised the Productivity Commission's recent review of the workplace relations system, saying it was a government-created vehicle for "big employers" to push for cuts to penalty rates, cuts to wages, wider use of individual contracts, and make it easier to sack people "all in the guise of 'flexibility'."
Mr Oliver, who was elected ACTU secretary three years ago, also said the decline in living standards and widening economic inequality in Australia needed to be arrested, and this would be a "major focus" of the ACTU Congress in a few weeks' time.
The Congress would also talk about the misuse of temporary migration to plug workforce gaps, the "Americanisation" and casualisation of the workforce, abd the consequences of the digital revolution for Australian workers.
"I don't have all the answers but at our Congress this month, I want to lead a discussion about what our movement will look like in the future, and how we adapt to this digital revolution," he said.
The Heydon royal commission's interim report into union corruption was tabled in Parliament on December 19 last year.
Royal commissioner Dyson Heydon said in his report he found no grounds for criminality over former Primer Minister Julia Gillard's involvement in a union "slush fund".
But he recommended Ms Gillard's former boyfriend Bruce Wilson, and his former Australian Workers Union colleague, Ralph Blewitt, face conviction for their fraudulent use of a secret slush fund.
It emerged last month that Mr Heydon - a former High Court judge - has spent much of this year teaching law at Oxford University.
Until recently, the inquiry had not had a public hearing for nearly six months.
