"When the federal government declared its intention to crack down on a grossly overpaid, mollycoddled group of employees, whose greedy pursuit of personal enrichment is conducted with utter contempt for Australia's national interest, and who believe they are beyond accountability to mainstream Australia, I was appalled. Some of my best friends work in the money markets."

So wrote journalist Malcolm McGregor this week in the Australian Financial Review, Australia's national daily business newspaper. He was writing, of course, not about the money markets, but about Australia's increasingly bitter and dirty docks dispute.

But his slightly tongue-in-cheek cynicism is a measure of how hard it is to predict who will ultimately win this dispute, already costing millions in disrupted imports and exports. And how increasingly hard, therefore, it is to predict who will win the general election which is likely to be held before the end of the summer.

Industrial relations is rapidly becoming a major political issue. The row has been in the making probably since the present Liberal/National government was elected in 1996, vowing to reform industrial relations, virtually scrapping national agreements on pay and conditions, pushing instead workplace agreements and individual contracts between employers and employees.

Information which has emerged in the past two weeks strongly suggested that secret, detailed plans for the current confrontation had been laid by Patrick, the stevedoring company at the centre of the dispute, as long ago as September last year. The federal Minister for Workplace Relations, Mr Peter Reith, and the Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, are openly backing Patrick against the union.

It is this, and the increasing evidence that the company deliberately engineered the dispute, that makes it more than just another dock strike. Mr Reith admits he has been on the phone to the company offering legal advice and support. The union has gone to court claiming he has conspired illegally to deprive workers of their legitimate entitlements.

A spokesman for Mr Reith told The Irish Times this week: "No matter what anyone else tells you, the whole nub of this dispute is that the Maritime Union of Australia is a monopoly supplier of labour on the waterfront and has been for 50 years. This strike is about the MUA objecting to nonMUA labour on the waterfront," he said.

The union, and the central union body, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, says it is a deliberate attempt to break the union and to undermine the union movement.

The Opposition leader, Mr Kim Beazley, says that if the courts allow the government to "connive" with a private sector employer to deprive people of their jobs, then no Australian worker's job will be safe.

The first signs of real trouble came last December, when it emerged that Australian recruits were being trained as non-union stevedores in Dubai. The men had been recruited, largely through advertisements in the Australian army newspaper, The Army. The organisers at first denied then admitted the men were being trained to work in Australia.

The chairman of Patrick, Mr Chris Corrigan, denied at the time being involved; two months later he confessed he had known about the operation. Largely as a result of the publicity, the Dubai operation collapsed and the would-be wharfies were sent home without completing their training.

But early in the new year, a company set up by the National Farmers' Federation in Australia specifically to operate as a stevedoring company, leased part of the docks in Melbourne from Patrick.

The MUA were locked out of that area, Webb Dock. Pickets were mounted and legal writs began to fly. On Tuesday last week, Patrick sacked its entire unionised workforce of 1,400 stevedores. It was able to do so because in September, Patrick's parent company, Lang Corporation, had quietly restructured the group, transferring the employment of its stevedores to subsidiary companies. On April 8th, it announced that these subsidiaries were now insolvent, and the wharfies were out of a job.

Lang and Patrick remain solvent. Lang shares rose sharply and closed at record levels this week. The MUA sought and secured a temporary injunction preventing Patrick from implementing the sackings: Patrick have in effect ignored the court ruling, and brought in non-union labour to unload ships around the country.

But significant numbers of trains and trucks have refused to cross the MUA pickets at the dock gates, and already Toyota has announced the temporary closure of a major car factory in Melbourne for want of parts held up by the dispute.

The Australian government argues that the stevedores in Sydney are overpaid, averaging Aus $72,000 a year (about £35,000), between 50 per cent and three times more than comparable workers. The ACTU counters that to earn that sort of money the stevedores work more than 40 hours a week, and points out that the MUA has only 9,000 members. It says the increase in Australia's export competitiveness that would be achieved even by cutting stevedores' pay and conditions in half would be insignificant. It is a battle about politics, not pay. Money market dealers are not members of the MUA.