OZ
By Peter Boyle
If one thing is predictable about the October 3 election, it is that the winning party will not have the enthusiastic support of a majority of people. Labor or Coalition will have been pushed over the line mainly by the fear that the other mob will be worse.
If Labor wins, it will be because people (rightly) fear the GST. If the Coalition wins, it will be because of a fear that Labor will manage the economy worse. That fear is misplaced: the economy is heading into recession, regardless of which party is elected.
The new government will face a suspicious public, braced for more broken promises and more pain. People have learned to treat Coalition and Labor politicians' election promises with utter distrust. A Bulletin Morgan poll taken in April found that only 7% of Australians believed politicians were honest and ethical, and that 66% were unhappy with the major parties.
Australians are reputed to have long been cynical about politicians. Yet a similar poll in 1976 found that 19% believed that politicians were honest and ethical. What has happened since then?
'Necessary' lies
Psychologists and ethicists blame everything from television to the decline of the family, but they've missed the main point: it has become necessary for pro-big business parties to lie because they share a program for the massive redistribution of income and power from the majority of people to the small minority of corporate rich.
This bi-partisan program, called economic rationalism or neo-liberal economic reform, involves progressively deregulating the labour market (i.e., weakening unions and workers' bargaining power), privatisation, cuts to public services, deregulation of the finance sector and tax cuts for the rich.
The neo-liberal consensus of capitalist parties reflects the crisis that big business around the world faced after the end of the post-war economic boom in the mid-1970s. Since then, big business profits have only been able to grow at the expense of the living standards of the world's majority.
In the 1980s it was possible for Labor to sell the attacks to the public as "good for the nation", sacrifices that would bring better times for all. But these explanations have worn thin as the rich have become richer, the poor poorer and most people more insecure.
Unemployment has been climbing and the welfare state has been vandalised by successive governments. We've been around the corner twice with the economic cycle and still the good times haven't arrived for most of us, yet we have had to watch the super-rich party it up in the 1980s and again in the 1990s.
Big business is demanding an acceleration of neo-liberal reform. It wants more anti-union laws, more privatisation and more tax reform favouring big business and the rich. Consequently, capitalist politicians have to lie about their program in order to get elected.
Howard had to pretend he'd given up key parts of this agenda in order to win the 1996 election. Now Labor has to pretend it has learned its lessons, eaten heaps of humble pie and, in Cheryl Kernot's words, discarded the "worst aspects of economic rationalism".
This snowballing crisis of legitimacy of the major parties has spawned a range of smaller parties.
In the 1980s, the political breaks were largely from Labor and to its left, for example the Nuclear Disarmament Party and the Greens. The Australian Democrats, originally a split from the Liberals, also shared the benefits of these breaks from the major parties' traditional support base. That's why the Democrats attempted to recast themselves as more progressive in the late 1980s and early '90s.
But the most recent break has been from the Coalition's base, and the chief beneficiary has been One Nation. Along with disgruntled former National voters, One Nation has also attracted some former Labor supporters from the working class.
In the lead up to October 3, polls are showing that One Nation enjoys significant support in regional cities and the outer suburban fringe of some big cities. This is happening even though Hanson exposed her anti-working class politics with her 2% flat tax plan and her proposal to restrict Medicare to only the poorest.
One reason is that many workers have stopped listening to the major parties' politicians and the big business media. The latter may have declared One Nation dead too soon.
Another reason is that the union movement has compounded its error of doing the dirty on workers for the previous Labor government (through the ACTU-ALP Accord) by throwing their weight into a campaign to return Labor to government. Even the most militant unions have done this.
Labour movement
In the process, the unions have given up the chance to use independent campaigning around issues important to the working class to put pressure on both the Coalition and Labor. (The same mistake was made by the peak environment groups with the Jabiluka issue, which was consequently sidelined.)
This has allowed Labor to get through the election without promising to repeal Howard's anti-union Workplace Relations Act. It's also given the Coalition the confidence to propose a second wave of anti-union laws which will further erode the right to strike. They even un-shelved Peter Reith for this announcement!
The unions have also been largely silent on the rise of racism and One Nation. Racist scapegoating has a long and shameful history in the Australian labour movement and very little has been done from these quarters to uproot it.
Some unions have adapted to racist prejudices within the working class. They have started reporting workers to the immigration authorities simply on unconfirmed suspicions that they may be illegal immigrants, based on their Asian appearance.
The ACTU leadership and Labor and Coalition politicians pay lip-service to the ample evidence that immigrants don't cost jobs, but simultaneously reinforce migrant scapegoating by insisting on restrictive immigration policies, supposedly to take into account the difficult economic times.
The flip-side is that the unions haven't seriously campaigned against unemployment since the 1970s. The 35-hour week demand is on the ACTU's policy book but the average work week has crept up to 41 hours.
In this sense, the union leaderships and Labor politicians share responsibility for the rise of One Nation.
The union movement could have done so much more. The working class in Australia still has the power to fight against the attacks from the ruling class, as we glimpsed for a few weeks during the struggle to defend the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA). It was quite amazing, and terrifying to the ruling class.
But we also saw the lack of will of many union leaders to lead a sustained struggle, and their eagerness to cut a deal with the bosses, even at the expense of their members.
The MUA struggle was a nice break from the retreats led from above that have characterised many workers' struggles in recent years. And it was a reminder of the huge potential of our class. But if this is to be generalised, class conscious militants have to win a stronger position in the union movement, and in other social movements.
In this election, the main capitalist parties have had to make some concessions: a Labor government will be tied to its promise of no GST, at least for another three years, and both Labor and Coalition will have to slow the privatisation agenda a little, for a while, to contain the dissatisfaction in rural Australia.
If the working class had independently flexed its muscles, however, we'd have seen much bigger retreats by the capitalist parties.
[Peter Boyle is the national election campaign director for the Democratic Socialists and a NSW Senate candidate.]