Larry Marshall
Rainbow Alliance is fielding Christine Craik in Port Melbourne and Nigel D'Souza in Batman and is supporting Janet Powell's Senate ticket. What is the Rainbow Alliance expecting from its campaign in Victoria?
Rainbow's House of Representatives candidates won't get in, but we are confident of Janet Powell retaining her seat. She has made a strong commitment to a broad range of policies that Rainbow has hammered out over the last couple of years and we are proud of the fact that we have the sort of developed policies that you would expect from a senior group or party in our community.
Janet Powell will be a strong, independent voice in parliament and an able spokesperson for alternative and radical politics. This is very important today because the parameters of political debate are being very narrowly defined by the media.
Labor has given away its commitment to social justice, to the working class and to the environment. It has sacrificed its community credentials. It is mouthing the same rhetoric as the Liberals, with a few superficial trimmings, and it is concerned about fitting in with the global market, fitting in with the interests of the multinational corporations at the expense of important community values.
This is Rainbow Alliance's first electoral campaign. What are your objectives?
Our main agenda this time around is to raise our policies. This is a small electoral intervention to change the agenda and we have come to realise just how powerful the Fourth Estate is. Apart from some fair treatment on radio and in the alternative media, our campaign has been given very little space. Even on the day that it was announced that official unemployment had passed the 1 million mark, the mainstream media could find no space for a mention of Rainbow's emergency employment program.
The same thing happened with our policies on defence, the environment, health and agriculture, even though we were raising issues that no-one in the major parties is talking about.
Rainbow Alliance will probably run a more ambitious campaign in future elections. There has been a lot of contention among our members about possibly dirtying our hands with electoral politics or risking our principles, but the experience of running this campaign has allayed these fears and changed the debate in Rainbow. It has demonstrated how an election campaign can empower the community and reach out to the public.
What is Rainbow's opinion on the development of the NZ Alliance? Do you see a similar development being possible in Australia?
This is more a personal opinion based on following the developments in act with Jim Anderton [leader of the NewLabour Party, part of the Alliance] when he addressed a Rainbow Alliance dinner last year. We are very much encouraged by the Alliance and hope that there will be the opportunity of building coalitions with alternative forces in agreement with our policies. Certainly we have explored joint work with 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ of the Democrats, the Greens and the New Left Party (which is in our alliance in this election campaign). We produced a joint policy statement called "Work and the Economy" with these forces.
Perhaps we are seeing the beginnings of a "third force" in Australian politics. This is probably the right time to build an alternative to the major parties, but it doesn't preclude us from making our main thrust working in the social movements and working on policy development.
We don't want a superficial coalition, we want a coalition that is a vehicle for the movements rather than a coalition that simply rides on the dissatisfaction in the movements with the politics of the major parties.
There has to be a change in thinking in alternative politics. We must stop thinking that the ultimate goal is a Green government in 10 years (as Bob Brown once put it). We also lose something by focusing on individual politicians.
Alternative political movements have to recognise that the process of coalition building and policy development is as important as the coalition itself.
A lot of the divisions in the left are disappearing, perhaps in the face of the advance of pre-fascist politics. This is adding further impetus to coalition building and this will continue after the elections.
Rainbow declared that its campaign was at least a nine-month one: three months leading up to the election and six months after. Politics should be something we engage in consistently, not something left to elections every three years.