On March 23, Ewan Saunders was preselected as Socialist Alliance candidate for the seat of Brisbane in the upcoming federal election. Saunders is Queensland co-convenor of SA and is studying occupational therapy at the University of Queensland.
Since leaving high school in 1999, he has campaigned for workers rights, particularly lower paid and youth workers, against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for Indigenous rights, refugee rights, action on climate change, international solidarity from Venezuela to Palestine, and many other local and global issues. He is currently active in the Community Climate Network Queensland.
As part of the first Australian solidarity brigade to Venezuela in 2005, he was a member of the Australian delegation to the World Federation of Democratic Youth conference.
The following is an excerpt from a talk Saunders presented at the March 23 SA meeting on the experience of socialists in parliament, which began by recounting the example of Communist Party of Australia MP Fred Paterson.
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Fred Paterson was born in Rockhampton in 1897 … His experiences of World War I and mass poverty in Australia and Ireland, as well as the success of the first workers' revolution in Russia in 1917, led Paterson to join the Brisbane branch of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in 1924.
He became a successful barrister, who fought important cases for poor clients and for the CPA.
But Paterson is best known as the first and (so far) only communist elected to a state or federal parliament. He was elected as the member for the north Queensland electorate of Bowen in 1944, and was re-elected in 1947.
He did not limit himself to the parliamentary arena. He continued to be involved in many campaigns, and used his parliamentary position to assist them. His involvement in the 1948 Queensland railway strike was a prime example.
Fred Paterson was an excellent example of how a socialist should treat parliament … In one parliamentary session, he said: "So far as I am concerned, in this house I represent and stand for one class and one class only — the useful people in this community, not the useless parasites who fatten on their lifeblood."
For Paterson, a parliamentary platform was a means to organise the working class to take politics into its own hands. It was part of the broader struggle to bring about a society in which "all work for the good of all".
Paterson had a rich tradition of socialist agitation in parliament to draw upon. The most successful exponents prior to World War I were the Bolshevik Party MPs in Russia, who were able to use the Tsarist Duma to both expose the government and draw people into political action.
The Bolshevik view of the role of Communists in parliament was outlined in a set of theses adopted by the Communist International in 1920. In essence, socialists should aim to expose the limitations of parliament as a path to improved living conditions for working people [and] use the parliamentary platform for general socialist agitation.
Communist parties were to openly state their political positions, and parliamentarians were bound to support the policies they were elected on.
The Bolsheviks clearly stated that the fundamental method of struggle of the working class against capitalist rule is mass action: parliamentary tactics, although important, are supplementary and subordinate … They used their election campaigns to do the opposite of what the parliamentary system is all about — to draw working people into political activity, rather than excluding them from it.