25.06.1998

Australian left at sea

Reaction to One Nation

Following the Queensland state elections, the mainstream media have been busy apportioning been blame (or, in a few cases, credit) for the success of Pauline Hanson’s rightwing racist One Nation party. One Nation gained 12 seats out of 89 in its electoral debut on a populist anti-Aboriginal and anti-Asian immigration platform.

Politicians from all the main parties have been finger-pointing as well, with the federal Liberal Party reversing the Queensland Liberal’s policy of recommending supporters to give their lower-preference votes to Hanson’s party. In an emerging consensus between Labor and Liberal at the national level, it appears that One Nation will be put last on the preference lists of both parties in the forthcoming federal election. Already, Prime Minister John Howard has said this will be the case in his leafy Sydney harbourside seat of Bennelong.

While the liberal anti-racist agenda dominates the Australian media, criticism of One Nation has been muted from some quarters, the ghost of the White Australia policy not yet fully exorcised from the body politic by multi-culturalist consensus. Unlike in Britain, where to raise the ethnicity of an immigrant nowadays consigns a politician to the fringes, in Australia, the legacy of the former racist immigration policy still lingers.

Now that One Nation has broken into the big time, the government-owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation has said it will allocate it free air time in the lead-up to the forthcoming federal poll. This will give added respectability.

The reaction of the left press to One Nation’s sudden explosion in support is worth examining. All the left pundits, as well as those writing for Packer or Murdoch, have been able to comment on the widespread disenchantment with the major parties, and can also agree that, in the short term, One Nation’s support is largely at the expense of the conservative coalition. In the month that One Nation support jumped from seven to 12%, coalition support dived by the same margin, from 39 to 34%, while Labor’s support rose one point to 42%.

Yet beyond that the left in Australia, marginal and divided as it is, has developed fairly bog standard, yet conflicting, responses to One Nation’s electoral bolt from the blue. The partial exception perhaps being the Democratic Socialist Party (formerly attached to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International).

Most of the old ‘socialist left’ of the Labor Party and dissolved fragments of the former Communist Party have nothing to say. These ‘forces’, having either retreated into academia or been absorbed into the trade union and public service bureaucracies, are all but spent. Old-fashioned social democracy has been squeezed by the realities of globalisation and the absence of a forward-moving workers’ movement (not withstanding the defensive struggle and partial victory of the wharfies). Besides, the economic nationalism of tariff protection is a key plank of One Nation’s politics. It is shared by the Communist Party (formerly the Socialist Party of Australia).

The two largest left organisations in Australia are the Cliffite International Socialist Organisation and the Democratic Socialist Party. Relations between the two organisations are not warm. The response of the ISO to One Nation is predictable for any left-watcher from Britain, but the DSP, while failing to break from an economistic understanding, is far more thoughtful than what can only be described as the brain-dead Cliffites’ knee-jerk ‘vote Labor, but ...’

International Socialist Organisation

Socialist Worker (Australia), a clone of the British publication, sang a familiar tune up to the Queensland election: “Vote Labor, but build a socialist alternative”. Perhaps the change of line on elections in Britain has not yet been fully digested on sunnier shores? While many are familiar with this slavish tailing of Laborism, in the context of the success of Hanson in providing an alternative to the mainstream parties, the ISO looks comatose.

Clearly, Hanson has not achieved her successes through arguing ‘Vote Liberal, but build the One Nation alternative’. All alternatives, by their very nature, begin as minorities. Hanson has directly aimed her message at a disenchanted minority. Her success, she believes, may yet see this turn into the majority rightwing party in Australia.

Even Socialist Worker (Australia) is able to see the success of this method for One Nation: “It is the cynicism people feel towards both major parties that Hanson taps into,” it notes (June 5).

Far from attempting to build an electoral audience now (rather than awaiting some imagined, surgically pure, breakaway from Labor in the glorious future), the ISO encourages continuing illusions in Labor: “[Queensland] Labor leader Peter Beattie’s failure to present Labor as a real alternative to the coalition feeds the idea that the major parties are the same.” It adds: “Socialist Worker supporters should vote Labor to get the Nationals out.” While thousands have already made it clear through their votes for One Nation that Labor is no alternative - a fact which the ISA has itself recognised - Socialist Worker criminally tries to push them back.

The same issue also notes: “When people were fighting to support the Maritime Union, Hanson was silenced. It was clear that workers had a common enemy.” Because of its crude economism, the ISO fails to see the raw material is right there for the building of an actual political alternative. We support strikes - let Labor take the racists on. The ISO will advise you from the sidelines. These are the politics of confusion and endless circles.

Socialist Worker states: “Rather than demolish the racist lies [of One Nation], Labor has insisted that native title is a ‘diversion’ from the real issue of ‘jobs’.” Yet in an interview in the British Socialist Worker (June 20) Alison Stewart of the ISO leadership seems to contradict this: “If they [Labor] had campaigned hard over issues like privatisation and deregulation then they could have won over some of those disillusioned with the [Queensland] government.”

Tied to the coat-tails of Labor, the ISO in Australia is committed to serving votes up to these reactionaries time and again.

Democratic Socialist Party

By comparison, the DSP’s opinions are more considered. In an interview in the Green Left Weekly (June 24) Peter Boyle, DSP federal election organiser, correctly points out that One Nation cannot simply be dismissed as an expression of rural backwardness. He correctly identifies the basis of One Nation’s platform as the national chauvinism of the capitalist class, not just the ‘Tories’, as the ISO would have us believe. Comrade Boyle says: “One Nation taps this ... [disenchantment] through a combination of scapegoating of Aborigines, Asians and ‘foreigners’, and an appeal to Australian nationalism. The line is that the alternative to so-called economic rationalism [neo-liberalism - ML] is economic nationalism ... It is appealing not just because it’s simple but also because it builds on years of brainwashing that all Australians share a common interest.”

While partially identifying the source of One Nation’s ideas, comrade Boyle fails to point to the petty bourgeois nature of Hanson’s eclectic programme. It appeals to small farmers and other small businesses, as well as backward elements of the rural and urban poor. So far, Hanson’s support from larger big businesses is limited or non-existed.

Despite having the courage and principle to put its alternative to Labor where it most hurts them - in the ballot box - the DSP fails to break from economism, even if it is more sophisticated than the dull ISO version. When asked what the alternative to economic nationalism was, comrade Boyle says:

“Our message is that protectionism, economic nationalism, won’t save jobs, won’t stop the cuts to basic services and the destruction of entire communities. All big businesses are committed to the neo-liberal madness. If Australian capitalists are offered a few billion dollars more of tariff protection or subsidies, they’ll grab it, thank you very much, and then use it to ‘modernise’, restructure and sack another few thousand workers anyway ...

“If society wants to control the profit madness in the finance sector, it has to nationalise the whole sector and put it under democratic, community control ... If we want to stop the relentless job destruction by big businesses, we have to take them out of the hands of their profit-hungry owners” (Green Left Weekly June 20).

While it is important to develop clear answers around economic issues, a knee-jerk call to nationalise is, at the end of the day, no better than the programme of discredited ‘left’ social democracy or ‘official communism’. It is an economic ‘solution’ confined to the borders of the nation-state. Answers to economic problems of capitalism must be a subordinate part of a political programme of working class political self-emancipation.

The DSP does not see the connection between the political way we are ruled and its economic manifestations. Instead, struggles against racism, for democratic rights for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, for the right to strike, for women’s liberation and for a republic are subordinate to some abstract ‘socialism’, which seems to be equated to nationalisation (under workers’ control, of course).

If the DSP believes that ‘socialism’ will come through a party like itself nationalising capital, rather than through workers’ own self-activity, this only demonstrates how far it is from a Marxist approach.

Communist Party of Australia

The Communist Party of Australia, the renamed ‘Moscow-line’ rump of the former mass organisation, continues its head-in-the-sand nationalist approach to socialism. While echoing aspects of the British road to socialism, the CPA adopts a conspiracy theory to international and national politics. It sees creeping world government in the OECD-proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment. King Canute-like, it wants to resist the ‘evils’ of globalisation. And it seriously argues for the defence of ‘Australian sovereignty’.

In its analysis of Hanson, it has a similar approach. Writing in the Morning Star (June 17), Anna Pha, editor of The Guardian, paper of the CPA, points to a partial truth before continuing muddle-headedly. She writes: “Hanson is being used to change what is acceptable and to break down views which do not condone outright attacks on indigenous people, Asians, Italians, Arabs and other races and religions [sic]”.

It is unlikely that there are Machiavellian forces manipulating Hanson puppet-like in order to break down political correctness, as Pha imagines. While multi-culturalism is not yet as all-embracing as in the UK, it is already dominant.

Yet Hanson, from the reactionary side of politics, has seized upon the divide-and-rule reality of multi-culturalism. While this official anti-racism attempts to control ethnic and racial conflict in the interests of smooth capital accumulation, it is also able to pit community against community in the struggle for scarce ‘ethnic dollars’. Such ‘privileges’ are condemned by the racist bigots in One Nation.

Despite herself, comrade Pha, in the very next paragraph, can still write: “The Liberal Party felt it necessary to dis-endorse [Hanson] as a candidate in the federal elections.” Pha does not see the contradictory significance of the two statements. It seems that not all of the ruling class is that happy with racist views being associated with a possible party of government.

Comrade Pha argues: “Ms Hanson offers the ruling class a vehicle for directing disillusioned and disaffected voters in a politically ‘safe’ rightwing direction - one that will not challenge their interests.” Given Hanson’s incoherent views on guns, capital punishment, zero funding for the arts and xenophobic economic nationalism, not to mention her party’s links to loony rightwingers (including the Confederate Action Party and the anti-semitic League of Rights), she is viewed as far from “safe” by large sections of liberal (and some Liberal) opinion. The ruling class only turns to such extreme reactionary forces as a last resort, not only for use against the working class, but against dissenting elements of the bourgeoisie as well. While One Nation’s success has shifted Australian politics to the right, Hanson would have to clean up her act to become acceptable to the ruling class as things stand now.

The CPA, mired in conspiracy theories, fails to notice what the Green Left Weekly reports (June 24):

“Victorian premier Jeff Kennett has been quoted as being prepared to stay in politics longer than planned in order to ‘chase One Nation and its current philosophy down every burrow’. [Federal] government ministers have written to the Age defending multi-culturalism and citing business initiatives that look only at the colour of people’s money, not of their skins.”

Jeff Kennett of the Liberal Party, was once seen as the loony right of the conservatives. When he came to government in Victoria, many of the left ridiculously called his government ‘fascist’. Yet even he defends the status quo against Hanson’s extreme xenophobic nationalism.

But the CPA - the walking dead of  ‘official communism’ - could hardly be expected to produce an analysis that bears any resemblance to reality.

The ISO, condemned to parrot the dull politics of economism and Laborism, is equally bereft of ideas. It flips from ultra-left ‘storm the barricades’ to a pathetic tailing of  Labor. The DSP, despite claiming to have dropped Trotskyism and adopted Leninism, has certainly not broken with the economism so prevalent amongst the epigones of Lev Davidovich.

One Nation is a real threat in Australia. Let us hope the shock of the old parading as the new can act as a stimulus to the left to take up the battle for an independent working class programme.

Marcus Larsen