Actor joins union's manufacturing campaign

ACTOR Jack Thompson has been recruited for a campaign to promote the Australian Workers Union and the manufacturing sector.

The video ad, to be launched at the AWU's national conference on the Gold Coast on Monday, features Thompson reciting part of Henry Lawson's classic poem, Freedom's on the Wallaby.

In the video, titled A Union That Makes Things, Thompson rails against the "rich getting obscenely rich" just by "moving numbers on spreadsheets".

"When some of the richest people in the world are complaining about how hard they're doing - what is going on?" he says.

Thompson gives a brief economic lecture, saying the mining boom put upward pressure on the Australian dollar and created in Australia a "safe haven, a place for others to store their money".

But the high dollar, he explains, made it harder for industry to sell on the global market.

"On the shop floor, things were very different," the actor says.

"In the past five years, 130,000 manufacturing jobs gone, because someone forgot to turn the lights on and wake Australia up.

"We used to be a country that could be proud of what it made.

"But now we're making less and watching our factories close."

Thompson urges union members to "forge a new future".

"We are often at our best when our backs are to the wall - that's now," he says.

AWU national secretary Paul Howes says in the video his union wants a future that "is more than just being a sand-pit for another country".

"A future that builds things, which makes things," he says.

Thompson featured in Gough Whitlam's 1972 It's Time election ad.

Mr Howes told AAP Thompson was the first person the union thought of when looking for an authentic Australian voice.

"We knew that Jack is a strong believer in fairness and social justice, and that he also has an interest on the poetry of Henry Lawson - who wrote for the AWU's newspaper The Worker," he said.

"Jack also was a member of the AWU as a young man."

Prime Minister Julia Gillard will address the conference on Monday night.

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