People have been asking whether I have had any regrets since calling that cunt Peter Reith a cunt in yesterday’s column.

Do you mind if I answer in French, seeing I got an A for the subject in grade 10 at Aspley High: Non, je ne regrette rien!

Or back in plain English: If it talks like a cunt and walks like a cunt and acts like a cunt, then there’s a very good chance it’s a cunt.

Reith was a rolled-gold, top-shelf cunt for fully supporting Patrick Corporation for using attack dogs to lock out unionised workers on the Australian waterfront back in the late 1990s.

Reith was a rolled-gold, top-shelf cunt soon after for lying through his teeth to demonise refugees with his “children overboard” claims backed up by dodgy, deceitful, photos.

Can I pause momentarily to defend my exuberant use of the cunt-word?

A lot of my working life was proudly spent packaging newspapers and magazines for a swag of trade unions and it was an absolute joy to work with so many feisty, intelligent, feminist, women union leaders who never minded the occasional “cunt” escaping from their otherwise prudish lips.

I never thought much about it but maybe they reasoned that if blokes could put up with having words like “dickhead,” “bellend”, “prick”, “knob” and “tool” to criticise people’s actions and “cock-up” and “balls-up” to stress their failings, all those wonderful women friends of mine were not offended that such a glorious part of their anatomy could be applied to unpleasant or stupid or mistake-ridden folk of either gender.

Now back to Reith. As people mature, they either like the working class or they don’t. I decided early on that people who hate trade unions deep down hate workers. It’s as simple as that.

And through my profession association with unions, I consider myself to have been exceptionally lucky to have stood on the picket line on the docks at Botany in Sydney – 1998 from what’s left of my memory – when the word came through that wharf unions, led by the Maritime Union of Australia, had secured a big win in the Federal Court, with that body ruling that Patrick Corporation had acted illegally in restructuring their businesses to try to break the unions.

Ditto for some time later, on the crowded docks in Melbourne, when news broke there that the full bench of the Federal Court upheld that earlier decision. If some of those memories are slightly inaccurate, I’m not all that sorry.

The surge of emotions on both those occasions, proving that the people united, will never (sometimes) be defeated, stays with me to this day. Trust me, Buggers: I’m tearing up a bit here.

As I said, you either like working people or you don’t. That cunt Reith hated working people.

You either believe in some form or decency and honesty in political behaviour or you don’t. That cunt Reith, along with his cunt of a boss John Howard, never thought there was a stoop too low to descend to in order to achieve poll success at any price.

Don Gordon-Brown