WeeklyWorker

08.05.2025
SSN-Aukus submarine (artist impression)

Orange, green and red

Labor’s thumping election victory resulted from more than Trump and the rush for safety. Liberal dog whistles and the promise of nuclear power stations were soundly rejected. Marcus Strom looks at the results and calls for the creation of a worthwhile left

In the 1979 film Being there, Chance, a gardener, played by Peter Sellers, manages to rise to the top of political society simply by being in the right place at the right time: he mouths homilies and vapid nostrums that reassure those around him. By occupying a space and allowing people to project their wishes onto him, he channels a desire for sensible change and becomes a vehicle for their hopes. His calm demeanour and seeming wisdom in a crazy world projects stability to those around him.

In a sense, this is the political programme of Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese. Although, as I write, not every single result is known, it is clear that the Australian Labor Party has just won a thumping re-election with an increased majority. But it still lives with the ghost of Gough Whitlam, the reforming prime minister (1972-75), who achieved much, but burned out quickly: he was removed from office in a monarchical coup, dismissed by Her Majesty’s representative, the governor general, and trounced at the next election.

Inner circle

Albanese and his inner circle do not want Labor to be the ‘shock and awe’ party that moves fast and breaks things. He wants the ALP to be the stable, natural party of a ‘kinder’ capitalism. In the campaign, to mark himself out from the opposition conservative Liberal ‘nasty party’ and the shadow of Trump, he declared that kindness is not a weakness.

Of course, underlying the ability to deliver minimal ‘progressive’ reform at home with ‘kindness’ is Australia’s - and the ALP leadership’s - commitment to its role in the global imperialist order. Billions for the Australia-UK-US alliance (Aukus), support for Nato and, at best, a blind eye to the horrors of Gaza.

As the storm clouds gather internationally, an Albanese government is presented as a safe harbour. Thanks to a disciplined campaign, in which Labor strengths around healthcare, childcare and education were presented as a cost-of-living salve, voters responded like nervous investors flocking to gold and cash ahead of a looming recession. The working class, atomised after years of neoliberalism and a shrinking, bureaucratised union movement, took to the only tool it had at its disposal to ward off a Trump-lite Liberal opposition: ‘Vote ALP’.

After the flow of preferences, this delivered a 55% ‘two-party preferred’ result for the ALP - its highest distributed vote share since World War II. Yet this is tempered by the fact that it is the party’s sixth lowest primary (first-preference) vote in the 31 elections again since World War II: a mere 34.5%. While ‘first past the post’ systems like Britain’s are more unstable, the ALP victory - like Starmer’s - disguises a shallower support than the parliamentary majority would suggest.

Albanese was lucky to run a campaign with the storm merely threatening. He could pretend that a military alliance with the US and an economic reliance on China are compatible strategies. The future is yet to hit in full force. The thing about gathering clouds is they tend to deliver a storm. For Australian capitalism, that will come in the form of heightened trade wars - potentially a hot war - between China and the US. It will mean being forced to choose between its imperialist alliance with the US and economic prosperity through trade with China.

Ahead of being forced to make such a choice, Albanese thinks that, by ‘being there’ and occupying political office, domestic ‘Labor values’ of fairness and kindness will shape the country. Three or four terms in government means it will take the conservative Liberal National coalition another generation to unpick any gains, goes this logic. At his first press conference after the election, he said: “I am genuinely so optimistic that if we get this decade right, we can set Australia up for the many decades ahead.” This ‘steady as she goes’ mantra was reinforced by chief Aukus shill, defence minister and deputy prime minister Richard Marles, endorsing a programme of “careful and stable incremental reform”. Inspiring stuff!

It is not Gough Whitlam upon whom Albanese is modelling himself, but the arch-nemesis of the ALP - former Liberal prime minister John Howard, who reshaped the country in government from 1996 to 2007. He famously urged Australians to be ‘relaxed and comfortable’ under his government - this would not sound out of place in the mouth of the current prime minister.

By remaining in office for more than a decade, Howard accelerated the decline of the post-war social democratic consensus, turning a country with echoes of solidarity into one where aspiration was no longer collective, but based on competitive individualism and people seeking to do ‘better than the Joneses’. In 1992, 41% of workers were in unions, today it is barely above 10% (in the private sector it is 7.9%).

The ALP has not yet dared to undo this new conservative consensus. Australians are lumbered with a tax regime that favours the old propertied middle classes and punishes renting working class youth; Australia provides massive subsidies to private health insurance schemes, as well as for private and elite education, making Australia a weird outlier in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, with more than a third of school students in private education.

Ahead of the election, when pressed on what many voters saw as a lack of ambition from Albanese, he said: “I don’t pretend to be a revolutionary. I’m a reformist - putting in place sensible mainstream reforms in a mainstream government.”

Toast to Trump

Midway through last year, Albanese looked toast. An anti-incumbency wave was sweeping the globe and domestically the ALP in 2023 had lost in a referendum its signature social reform: a change to the constitution to include an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice in parliament. The ALP was sinking in the polls, as Liberal leader Peter Dutton’s prospects rose.

That anti-incumbency wave reached its height in November 2024, which brought Donald Trump once again to the White House. And then things started to change. While it was largely domestic concerns that gave the ALP its huge majority in parliament, Trump’s shadow has loomed. Australia did not avoid the blanket tariffs regime and the mercurial announcements from Washington have sent a shiver through the body politic.

All through last year and up to the election campaign, Liberal leader Peter Dutton openly pushed Trumpesque policies - opposition to diversity in employment, dog whistles against trans people, a proposed Musk-inspired ‘efficiency’ office, an end to ‘wokeness’ in schools and, as the election campaign started, a call for public servants (many of whom work from home post-Covid) to work in the office five days a week.

As one commentator quipped, the Liberals hit the campaign trail losing. And, while Trump was an issue, blaming the orange one for the Liberal loss is, as another analyst noted, “being too kind to Dutton”, who was, it turns out, unelectable. For the first time in Australian history, an opposition leader lost his own seat. A magical moment on election night.

The call by Dutton for public servants to lose their right to work from home was meant to be a wedge to split the manual blue-collar voters from the ‘woke’ white-collar working class. But it blew up in his face and was seen as a direct attack on the whole working class - particularly women in the workforce - thus reinforcing the Liberal Party’s ‘woman problem’. Dutton was forced to reverse the policy and the Liberals never recovered.

In the final week of campaigning, in desperation, the conservatives reached for the culture wars. Complaining about indigenous ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremonies at sporting and public events and the flying of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, the Liberals threw red meat to its racist base. The fact they did this after neo-Nazis had booed Aboriginal speakers at an Anzac Day event the previous week, let the electorate know just how the nasty party works when in action.

Amid an uncertain global political environment (with an opposition whose answer to climate change was nuclear power in a country with the highest take-up of domestic solar power - who knew Australia was sunny?) and an opposition leader dubbed ‘the Temu Trump’, voters stayed with a safely underwhelming and predictably unambitious government.

Working class

On election night, the satirical news outlet, The Chaser, led its coverage with the headline, “Labor secures bigger majority, excited to do nothing with it”. While perhaps a tad unfair, it gives you the idea that there is less than zero chance of a crisis of expectations.

With the working class reaching for the ALP to defeat a reactionary Trump-tinged opposition, the Green Party vote has stagnated at 12% and its leader, Adam Bandt, actually lost his seat to the ALP. In 2022, the Greens won four lower-house seats, but they could go down to two or even one this time around. Their last-minute lurch to the right - pushing for ‘Aussie-built’ drones and missiles as a militarist counterweight to its anti-Aukus policy - did not sandbag ‘moderate voters’ enough to retain those gains. However, the Greens will retain the balance of power in the upper-house Senate.

The ALP framed the whole campaign around its strengths - minor improvements to the public health system, Medicare, plus investment in childcare, free vocational training and a 20% cut to all university student debt. It was backed by the union movement, which campaigned on the slogan, ‘Don’t risk Dutton’. And it was enough. In what was seen as a cost-of-living election, the ALP had the cards. A disciplined team and a much improved ground campaign has seen the ALP turn the vote around.

As there had been a slim majority in the House of Representatives (77 of 151 seats after the last election), many expected a hung parliament. But the Australian electorate had other ideas, delivering a very unusual swing (2.7%) to a sitting government and giving the ALP at least 87 seats out of 150 in the new parliament.

Some on the left wanted a hung parliament in the hope that the ALP would have to negotiate with the progressive-reformist Greens. In fact, it would have meant negotiating legislation with the liberal wing of the conservatives in exile - the ‘Teal’ movement of independent women MPs, who have won the wealthy, leafy seats of the metropoles.

Ruling split

There is no doubt the election has smashed the Liberal Party and thrown the ruling class’s preferred party into crisis. In all states, the Liberals have been largely expunged from the capital cities, and are likely to hold fewer than 10 inner urban or outer metropolitan seats.

This points to not only a decisive rejection by the working class, but a split in the ruling class and wealthy electorates. It seems unlikely this division is going away, with Australia’s richest person, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, saying the Liberal defeat was due to a failure to fully embrace Trumpism.

Australian capitalism is divided between its more urbane and liberal banking and finance sector and the more reactionary mining, resources and agricultural sector. Climate change is one of the big dividers here, and until the Liberal party can rewin the wealthy urban ‘Teal seats’, and find new wedge issues to divide the working class, it seems unlikely to be able to form a government any time soon.

Chinese-Australians were another decisive factor in some marginal seats. There are more than a million Australians with Chinese heritage, many of whom had drifted to the seemingly pro-(small) business, low-taxing Liberals. Covid shifted that sentiment, with former prime minister Scott Morrison taking a decidedly anti-Chinese tone ahead of his election loss in 2022. This time, an accusation by a senior Liberal MP just days before the election that “Chinese spies” were handing out election material for the ALP exploded across Chinese-language social media in Australia. Seats that were once marginal - Bennelong, Chisholm, Menzies, Aston, Reid - saw big swings to the ALP on the back of Chinese-Australian voters.

According to Guardian Australia, “Polling booths in Chatswood and Eastwood [in Sydney] - two suburbs in Bennelong where more than 40% of people have Chinese ancestry - recorded swings to Labor of between 15% and 26%. Labor’s Jerome Laxale boosted his wafer-thin margin of 0.1% in Bennelong to almost 10%, with 77% of the vote counted so far.”

With such a resounding victory, the semi-feudal nature of internal ALP politics means that Albanese is now a bona fide Labor hero - ‘King Albo’ will rule all before him. This will make campaigning against Aukus or for the dismantling of the anti-worker trade union laws more difficult in the short term. It will be up to the affiliated unions to force movement on these issues internally - a faint hope.

In his victory speech, which was an outpouring of Australian nationalism and “civic pride and responsibility” (the man actually believes it when he says Australia is the greatest nation on Earth), Albanese again flaunted his Medicare card (a central prop in the campaign), but also pointed to a small legislative win for workers - the right to disconnect at the end of a shift, meaning your boss cannot phone or email you. Such a right, while a welcome gain, can only be enforced in a unionised workplace, of course. And, with Albanese emphasising an individual worker’s right to disconnect, the significant silence on the lack of our collective right to withdraw our labour resounded.

A Marxist left inside and outside the ALP must agitate for the unrestricted right of workers to strike - something largely unlawful in Australia. But that Marxist left is yet to be built, with the rump anti-Albo left factions (the ‘Soft Left’ in New South Wales; the ‘Industrial Left’ in Victoria) likely to be demoralised at Albanese’s crowning achievement A fundamental flaw of this ‘official’ left internal opposition is that it does not want to build a mass, militant working class party around a Marxist programme for socialism, but engage instead in deep trench warfare to win branch by branch, in order to replace the Albanese ‘left’. But this method will just create new Albaneses.

There will be some pressure in the party and the unions for the ALP to be ‘bold and beautiful’ and use its majority to enact far-reaching social reform. But this will be met with stony rejection from Albanese and his inner circle, who believe this election win is vindication that ‘slowly, slowly’ is the way forward for managerial Laborism. In the absence of any organised working class Marxist alternative internally and externally, it is unlikely they can be seriously challenged on this. Such an alternative is something that must be painstakingly built.

In a telling aside this week on FM radio, King Albo, unconsciously referring to himself as an emperor, said: “One of the things that renders our success possible is the fact that throughout the last three years I haven’t had to look over my shoulder [for leadership challengers] … I’ve got a Praetorian Guard, if you like, who do that for me.” Quite.

Left punch

One issue largely missing from the election was Palestine and the fact that the ALP government played softball with the Israelis, keeping its criticisms muted and in line with the ‘international community’: ie, what Biden and Starmer said. In electorates with large Arab and Muslim populations, independents backed by the Muslim Vote group failed to dislodge ALP incumbents. In the Sydney seat of Watson, a 5% swing against the ALP pushed home affairs minister Tony Burke to 48.8% of first-preference votes. The pro-Palestine independent, Ziad Basyouny, won 15.3% of the vote - or 30.7% after distribution of preferences.

The ‘pro-Palestinian’ Greens failed to dislodge the ALP in the Melbourne seat of Wills - their best chance in that city on the back of pro-Palestine sentiment. Since Hamas’s ‘prison breakout’ and slaughter on October 7, Australians have been increasingly horrified at the brutal, uncompromising and murderous response of the Zionist Israeli war machine. In opinion poll after opinion poll, it is clear Australian sympathies lie with the Palestinian people, even amid the attempts to drum up fear of a ‘confected anti-Semitism plague’ in Australia.

Yet the Palestinian solidarity movement - hamstrung by sectarianism and narrowly focused identitarian politics - has failed to engage this mass sentiment and turn it into a political force. The weekly Grand Old Duke of York demonstrations against Israel’s genocide decline, as the horror intensifies.

Also largely absent from the campaign, outside the pathetic culture wars of the Liberals and their reactionary hangers-on, was campaigning on policy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, let alone a push for a democratic and just treaty with First Nations people. Burnt by the failure of the Voice Referendum, the ALP left this well alone. But at least the electorate rejected the Liberals’ last-gasp attempt to enflame the culture wars around indigenous issues.

Nevertheless, the working class, in large, voted Labor - not as an expression of positive class identity, but as a negative expression of its potential against reactionary elements of the ruling class. However, in small pockets, Marxist groups managed to gain respectable votes, punching above their normal (statistically zero) results of 1% to 2%, albeit standing on a non-Marxist election platform.

The Victorian Socialists, whose driving force is the (post) Cliffite Socialist Alternative group, stood candidates in four seats, as well as for the Senate in Victoria. The Socialist Alliance - the party form of the liquidated Democratic Socialist Party and publisher of Green Left (no longer Weekly!), stood for the Senate in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia, with lower house candidates in six seats nationally.

Going national

Outside Victoria, the Socialist Alliance got the normal low votes for small, isolated sectarian groups: for the Senate, 0.3% in NSW, 0.7% in Queensland, 0.3% in Western Australia. For the lower house, it won 2.2% in the seat of Sydney (NSW), 1.6% in Newcastle (NSW), 1.9% in Rankin (Queensland) and 0.9% in Fremantle (WA). However, in Victoria, it was a different story. In the seat of Wills, a sitting local councillor - Sue Bolton of the Socialist Alliance - won 8.3% of the vote. In Corio, the SA won 3.0%.

In 2022, the Socialist Alliance and Victorian Socialists had stood against each other in the Melbourne seat of Wills, splitting the socialist vote. But sense prevailed this time, with the Victorian Socialists stepping aside for the Socialist Alliance and the Socialist Alliance not standing for the Senate in Victoria.

Unsurprisingly, this saw the Socialist Alliance vote in Wills move from 2.9% from 2022 to 8.3% in this election. The Victorian Socialists in 2022 received 3.1% - a combined socialist vote of 6%, showing unity can deliver a result bigger than the sum of its parts, even if only 2.3 percentage points. The Victorian Socialists stood for the Senate, attracting a modest 1.8% of the vote. But from lower-house electorates they received 8.9% in Cooper, 6.8% in Scullin, 6.6% in Fraser - areas where they have stood before and contested strongly in local elections - and 1.7% in regional Bendigo, the first time they contested this seat.

Socialist candidates did well when they stood with forces beyond narrow sect groups, where they have had strong council votes, and recontested areas where they previously campaigned - by ‘being there’. However, the method used is to stand on policies practically indistinguishable from the petty-bourgeois, left reformist Green Party.

In testament to this, the Socialist Alliance issued an election score card on ‘vital issues’ - ‘Scrap Aukus’, ‘No more coal and gas’, ‘Build and defend public housing’, ‘Cut ties with Israel’, ‘Defend the CFMEU union’, ‘Health, education, energy in public hands’, ‘Refugee rights’, ‘First Nations sovereignty’, ‘Defend LGBTIQ+ rights’, etc - and showed a solid green tick against all these for the Greens, Victorian Socialists and Socialist Alliance, adjacent to crosses for the ALP and Liberal Party.

This just underlines there is no programmatic difference in these ‘socialist’ campaigns from the Green Party’s left reformism. What is even the point of standing, if not for Marxism and socialism? It is not the role of Marxists to merely reflect back to the electorate ‘progressive’ ideas that spontaneously take root. ‘Being there’ is not enough. This in reality is the programme of Laborism - marginal reform based on the existing consciousness of society. The Marxist programme for extreme democracy, republicanism and working class liberation must go much further than this and seek to shift society beyond current limits - that is, to be revolutionary.

In a positive sign for left unity outside the ALP, the Victorian Socialists indicated they intend to ‘expand’ and nationalise their electoral campaigning. But lord help us if they adopt the name ‘Australian Socialists’ - dreadfully nationalist, but its possibility points to the woeful parochialism of the ‘Victorian Socialists’ name.

The neophyte Revolutionary Communist Organisation has recently joined the Victorian Socialists and will be urging its electoral work to go national - but on the basis of a democratic-republican, Marxist programme. In the election, it recommended a socialist vote with preferences to the ALP, unlike most of the far left, which sent preferences to the Greens. I understand the RCO will organise a communist caucus in the Victorian Socialists and seek to push this Australia-wide.

It remains to be seen if the Socialist Alliance will deepen its cooperation with the Victorian Socialists and Socialist Alternative. Past record suggests a return to sectarian bunkers, but, where there is life, there’s hope.

However, it is only by standing on a clear platform that fights for republicanism, socialism and internationalism, for system change, not climate change, and against militarism, imperialism and war, that the working class can, in the words of Marx, transform universal suffrage from an instrument of capitalist deception into an instrument of working class emancipation.

Alternatives

Any moves towards socialist unity outside the ALP for electoral work should not continue to peddle meek Green Party policies, but campaign for consistently democratic and socialist politics.

Such unity, as a minimum, could be around a platform that fights for: