24.09.1998

Prozac elections

As Australia goes to the polls, central questions are ignored

Class war on the waterfront, a referendum for a republic, divisions in parliament and on the streets over Aboriginal land rights, the emergence of Pauline Hanson’s racist One Nation party … you might think that the past 12 months would have set the scene for a political debate of the highest quality in the run-up to the Australian federal election on October 3. If so, you would not be further from the truth.

The main issue in this election is, it seems, a goods and services tax (GST) proposed by the incumbent conservative Liberal-National coalition. It dominated last week’s television debate between Prime Minister John Howard and opposition Labor leader Kim Beazley. Breaking the supposedly axiomatic law of bourgeois politics never to go to the electorate proposing new taxes, the linchpin of the government’s election campaign has been its 10% across-the-board GST. The Liberal Party is repeating what led it to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory two elections ago. John Hewson lost the ‘unlosable’ election in 1993 against Labor’s deeply unpopular Paul Keating by centring his platform on a similar tax.

In what has been a dull campaign so far, Labor - starting from behind in the polls - has edged ahead for the first time on 43%. Coalition support has slipped to 42% and One Nation is currently at eight percent nationally. It is not clear whether Hanson’s ultra-right party will win any seats in the lower house of parliament, as her own rating is only running at around 35% in her constituency. The middle-of-the-road Democrats are at a paltry three percent, their popular leader having defected to Labor in 1997.

With the bourgeois political classes safely confining the question of a republic to their own dull, narrow framework, such a ‘divisive’ issue is being sidelined by both the government and the Labor opposition. The Liberals wish to avoid being seen as too monarchist by an electorate which is now around 60% republican. Labor too is quite happy to fight an election on grounds it thinks it can win - a scare campaign over tax. The party is still scared of its own shadow after Paul Keating lost the 1996 election. Then it was supposedly removed from ordinary concerns and too focused on ‘big picture’ issues of a republic, Australian capital in Asia and the information technology revolution,

In April and May this year, everything looked so different. A union-busting attack on the Maritime Union of Australia by Patrick stevedores, backed by a rightwing government, sent Australia into the throes of a highly political class battle over who controlled the country’s economically vital waterfront. The importance of the struggle in a country were union power had been controlled - but not smashed - by Labor in government in the 1980s drew parallels with the British miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85. A strategic phase of the class war was being played out.

And the wharfies won. Or so it seemed. Negotiations after the high court victory against the stevedores in favour of union labour on the docks resulted in compromise. The leadership of the MUA was content to negotiate a deal which maintained its monopoly over jobs, at the cost of a further eroding conditions.

At the time, spirits were high in militant working class circles. There was a feeling that the tide was flowing in the right direction, and an urge to take victory all the way. However, the left largely remained cheerleaders of the union bureaucracy. Despite some criticism from sections of the revolutionary left, no alternative leadership was forged out of the struggle. The rank and file were sold out to ‘protect the union’.

In the immediate fallout of the waterfront dispute, Kim Beazley’s Labor opposition hit the lead in opinion polls for the first time since losing the 1996 election. Further, Labor seemed to have the coalition on the ropes over the government’s legislation amending the Native Title Act on Aboriginal land rights over agricultural land on crown leases.

However, the continued pressure on the political mainstream from the petty bourgeois One Nation saw the main parties close ranks. Labor’s insistence on not wanting to fight a ‘race election’ on land rights and the failure of the left to cohere and develop a coherent political alternative has made these the Prozac elections.

With typical Australian jingoism, sport has at times seemed to leave the election in the shade. Eighty gold medals in Kuala Lumpur, Aussies in the US Open tennis, the rugby league and Australian rules grand finals, the Poms on their way for a good thrashing in the Ashes ... Kim Beazley even argued that the prescient John Howard had timed the election so it was swamped by sport - until he was ahead in the polls.

The conservative Liberal-National coalition - while publicly tearing themselves apart in some areas over whether to give voting preferences to One Nation over Labor - are hoping to run a narrow, run-of-the-mill campaign to bore the country into voting for the status quo. When Howard was elected in 1996, he promised the Australian electorate a quiet life. After the debacle over the wharfies, land rights and Liberal preferences to One Nation in the Queensland state election, this time the government is trying to kill off the opposition’s tactic of painting Howard as divisive.

Labor, while attempting to widen the scope of the political debate, is also hoping to avoid being seen as ‘divisive’ - which is supposedly a terribly ‘unAustralian’ characteristic. Such is the formula for an anodyne campaign.

In opposition to this, the Democratic Socialist Party is standing candidates for the senate in all states and territories. For the first time in many years, the entire electorate will be able to register a vote for a socialist party. Yet the DSP’s platform lacks programmatic coherence for current Australian conditions. A semi-reformist, semi-activist wish list, it has no immediate alternative to the undemocratic monarchical federal state.

Marcus Larsen