New Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Sally McManus is in the culture-war crosshairs after saying on 7.30 that she has no problem with people breaking “unjust laws”. Like clockwork, the government and the rightwing press have reacted as though the sky’s falling in, and journalists – from Fairfax’s Bevan Shields to the ABC’s Barrie Cassidy – are solemnly pontificating on what a colossal blunder McManus has apparently made.

Let’s not dwell too long on the numbingly obvious point that without people breaking laws they considered unjust or unfair, most of the 20th century’s major advances in social and economic justice would not have happened. If you don’t believe me, go read Martin Luther King’s letter from Birmingham jail instead.

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Let’s also dispose of the hysteria from Coalition MPs and many in the media that implies McManus was spruiking anarchic lawlessness. McManus was arguing that construction workers shouldn’t be forced to work on unsafe building sites, as the law currently allows. She wasn’t advocating The Purge.

Let’s focus instead on the reflexive flinch, disguised as an idea, that this is bad politics. The thinking goes that McManus has gifted the government a stick with which to beat Labor over the head with until election time, and that you just don’t do that if you want to win elections. Instead, you should play it safe, present as small a target as possible, and never pick a fight if you can afford it, especially on issues like economic management that conservatives will jump to attack you over.

That certainly explains Bill Shorten’s jellyfish response that “we believe in changing bad laws, not breaking them”. ( Shorten is going to be flabbergasted when he finds out the union movement he sticks his face on won almost every labour reform you can name through industrial strikes and militant action, by the way.)

It’s true that the government will seize on McManus’s comments. They already have. Liberals from Malcolm Turnbull on down are lining up to have a go at McManus and ties her to Labor. You can expect Michaelia Cash to give this dead horse a flogging every time she’s within 10 miles of the words “penalty rates”, and for McManus’ 7.30 interview to show up in Liberal party campaign ads come 2019 complete with black-and-white fade-ins and sinister voiceovers about criminal unions.

Here’s a wild thought, though: so what? Who gives a stuff if the Liberals and the conservative press wail and moan about union iniquity? Let them. They never shut up about it anyway. Labor and major unions like the SDA have been supporting cuts to workers’ rights for years to try and neutralise that line of attack, and it’s never worked. All it’s done is conceded the ideological playing field to neoliberalism as the only “serious” way to order society and sold out the people labour movements are meant to protect.

And before someone starts going on about how naive and politically suicidal it is to raise big questions about labour and capital, how’s that optics-above-all-else strategy faring for progressives lately? At the same time this fart in a thimble is brewing, results from the Dutch election show that the Dutch Labour party has collapsed to an abysmal seventh place after years of helping to implement austerity policies on an electorate that thought it was voting for a party of economic justice.

Why might that be, I wonder? Could it be the same reason Hillary Clinton lost the unloseable presidential election to a reality show host, amoral bigot and serial sex pest? Might it have something to do with the collapse in support for centre-left parties across Europe that embraced Third Way economics and austerity?

Closer to home, might soulless, focus group-driven politics like the stuff we’re used to explain why – more than three years into taking the opposition leader job, and despite being up against a deeply unpopular government and prime minister – Bill Shorten is still widely disliked and distrusted by voters? It’s almost as if bending over backwards to avoid saying anything that could be remotely controversial – to constantly run away from hard debates instead of planting your flag – doesn’t appeal to the people who would otherwise vote for you.

Shorten didn’t invent this feeble school of thinking, but he is a longtime practitioner of it, and the results are plain to see. People aren’t inspired by it and they don’t accept its logic. Why should anyone vote for Labor if all they’re getting is a homeopathic version of Malcolm Turnbull? What do we imagine a Shorten prime ministership will work to achieve, if it ever happens? What would be the point of it?

McManus instinctively understands something too many on the left have forgotten: if you don’t have any guts, people won’t respect you, and if they don’t respect you, they won’t vote for you. Bill Shorten has no guts. Dutch Labour, and centre-left parties everywhere that tried and failed to dance the neoliberal-lite tightrope, have no guts. McManus does. The only reason people are so shocked at her comments is because we’ve forgotten what guts look like.

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Despite the backlash, McManus isn’t backing down. On Thursday, she released a defiant statement singing the praises of “our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents taking non-violent so-called ‘illegal’ action”. Following close on her heels, the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union has published a comprehensive list of the “crimes” committed by Australian unions that led to dignified, stable work arrangements nationwide. They’re providing a stellar example for Labor to follow.

Labor shouldn’t be running from McManus’s comments. They should be embracing them and offering her a safe seat at the next election. A Labor party too scared to make the case for real economic justice and an alternative to the neoliberal misery we currently live in is about as useful as jeans in a swimming pool.

Conservatives are always going to attack workers’ rights and the people who defend them. That is never, ever going to change. They can’t be appeased; their policies can’t be co-opted; their worldview can’t be bargained with. They can only be fought. If Shorten and Labor are too weak to take that fight to them, they should shut up and get out of the way to make room for people who will.