Red hopes and election blues A SNAP election called by Prime Minister Bob Hawke on June 11 resulted in his Australian Labor Party (ALP) being re-elected for a third term. Nationally, there was a 1% swing against the ALP, but in spite of this they increased their seats from 82 to 86. The conservative parties fared badly, mainly due to the disunity of the opposition, with both the Liberal and National parties losing two seats each, to take 43 and 19 seats respectively.
The ALP, in government since 1983, has presided over a fall in real living standards, consistently high levels of unemployment and an accelerating economic crisis.
The following article explains the reasons for the ALP's victory, and the problems confronting the Australian left. It is republished from the August issue of F.l. News, produced by supporters of the Fourth International in Solidarity.
HE LEFT has some bitter pills to swallow after last month: of the left during the federal election mirrored the confusion and ineptitude of the far-right that assured Labor's victory in marginal seats. The difference is that the right set the agenda on the main policy issues, while the left found itself on the defensive throughout.
Worse, no sector of the left shows any sign of having learnt anything from the dismal experience. Each organization solemnly declared that the results confirmed its analysis of the situation, and then it was business as usual. But behind the bravado is the sad reality that the main left organizations have no coherent strategy to take on Labor and its austerity policies; that their main concern is organiza-
This sectarian approach to the crisis of the left is nothing new. Each time there has been a "fightback event" in the past four years, the result has been a skirmish to control yet another "national organization". Activists were repeatedly urged to prepare for campaigns that never happened because they did not fit in the game plan of the parties. Such jousting by the main party elites has created virtually nothing by way of a real fightback, but has greatly increased burn-out and bitter-
In areas such as environment and Black struggles, activists have put up spirited campaigns against Labor with little visible help from socialist organizations. Instead, the left exhorts these to join them, join the new party or join the ALP, depending on the particular poison they're peddling.
The problem is not that activists in these areas refuse to join a political party, but that the political parties have nothing to offer these activists, a fact strikingly confirmed through the federal election campaign. For those with eyes to see, the main facts are clear enough.
Massive electoral swings against Labor
The ALP suffered massive electoral swings against it in working class areas. The worst swings were in New South Wales (NSW), where safe Labor seats saw an average swing of 4.36%. (Unless otherwise stated, figures are two-party preferred, based on 80% of the vote counted.) This average itself covers up the magnitude of the disenchantment and desertion - 10% in Sydney, 7% in Prospect, 6% in Fowler, 7% in Kingsford Smith and 6.5% in
Despite this massive erosion of electoral base, Labor picked up seats. Why? The ALP right-wing machine would have us believe that its "targeted, professional" campaign was designed to achieve this result. The
AUSTRALIA facts say otherwise.
• The erosion of the ALP's base vote took the pundits and the Labor machine by complete surprise.
• The environment vote, created by the mass movement, handed Labor 1% to 2% in key Queensland and Tasmanian seats.
Revolt of the "New Right"
• The New Right revolt, allegedly based on a coalition of small businessmen and farmers, failed to materialize.' While the national swing against the ALP in metropolitan seats was 1.65%, the non-metropolitan swing was a mere 0.72%. In fact, the main electoral impact of the New Right was positive for Labor, with the aborted Joh for Canberra push costing the conservatives a further 1% to 2% in Queensland.?
• Labor's own marginal seats held up due to the divisions and incompetence of the which delivered a vote for from the least politicized, middle layer urban voters. The crisis in the bosses' parties reflected long-standing political divisions among fractions of the bourgeoisie. [Liberal Party leader] John Howard is the product of a crisis of leadership in the ruling class, not its
The votes against Labor in working class electorates ended up going 50-50 to the Democrats and the Liberal Party. The news here is all bad for the left — the right-wing policies of the Hawke government have resulted in a measuraclass consciousness among blue-collar workers.
In general, protest candidates did poorly, both in comparison with the 1984 election and, particularly, when measured against the rhetorical predictions of the main left parties over the past 18 months.
Within this framework of weakness, the electoral strength of alternative candidates was directly proportional to their standing vis-a-vis actual cam-
Bill Hartley's Industrial Labor Party did very poorly in Victoria. The former Queensland senator George Georges benefited from his opposition to the introduction of a national identity card, but his vote failed to meet expectations because of the lack of a strong campaign on the issue. The highly visible election stunts by the NSW Green candidate lan Cohen produced fewer votes 1. The New Right is a business and industrial grouping in the Liberal Party whose aim is to push it further to the right. 2. State Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen is the leader of old Liberal atonal coalition.r wecked the 40 year- 21 the Queensland National Party. His bid to challenge Naold Liberal/National coalition. September 28, 1987 • International Viewpoint
AUSTRALIA
Australian Labor Party
than the Nuclear Disarmament Party's association with the anti-nuclear movement, which no doubt assisted Western Australia Senator Jo Vallentine as
The relationship between campaign strength and electoral result is particularly telling for socialists, who almost uniformly did far worse than expected. Hartley's Senate and House teams, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the Victoria seat of Gellibrand, the Socialist Party (handicapped by its lack of registration as a party for the Senate) in Grayndler and the Senate, and the CPA-SPA joint exercise in South Australia all polled dismally.4 If 2% of the vote is regarded as the minimum threshold for a meaningful result, politics did not make a dent.
Behind this depressing result is the fact that the central issue of austerity was never once effectively challenged by the trade-union movement in the run-up to or during the campaign. It is this lack of challenge that has bred disillusion and hostility to left politics in the working class.
Appeals to "run quiet" for fear of hurting Labor's re-election prospects are cold comfort for those whose standard of living is being slashed.
The authority of Hawke and Federal Treasurer Paul Keating's "solutions" to the economic crisis is based on the stranglehold of the labour bureaucracy, led by ACTU president Simon Crean and secretary Bill Kelty, on the trade unions. A political alternative to Labor cannot be built until this stranglehold weakened by sustained industrial action against pro-capitalist policies. Such action will both draw from and fuel social protest in all areas.
Such a fightback cannot be conjured out of nothing, but the situation is far from hopeless. The working class has not suffered a decisive defeat, although it has lost some battles. The capacity and willingness to struggle is still very International Viewpoint • September 28, 1987 much in evidence. The bourgeoisie has not resolved its own crisis of leadership, meaning first and foremost that it is not united on the necessity of a frontal assault on the labour movement. Internationally, imperialism is Gulf, the farm crisis, the debt question, inter-imperialist competition, the Contra-Iran scandal - as the international economy sinks into depression.
To harness the possibilities, the left must break out of the political blind alley, roll up its sleeves and start campaigning with a coherent strategy of united front work. We do not pretend to have a rounded analysis of the strategic dilemmas and their solutions, but many of the problems that need to be addressed are obvious enough:
The International Socialists, which is recruiting rapidly among youth, has a abstentionist position on CP has ambiguous position on austerity
The largest left group, the Communist Party, has a profoundly ambiguous position on the key class question —
The dominant faction in its leadership has a reformist strategy of wanting to manage the crisis of capitalism, which is why it was a co-architect and key enforcer of the ALP-Australian Council of Trade Unions accord. Its industrial cadre and supporters are firmly wedded to nationalist industry plans as trade-offs for wages and conditions.
The new party project, in which the CPA, the SWP and others are investing most of their political energy and capital, continues to place leadership-toleadership bargaining ahead of a united front response to the crisis. There is, of course, nothing wrong with trying to construct a larger more inclusive socialist party in Australia; however, if the organization that emerges is less coherent and less organized it will create more prob-
The new party project is premised on an incorrect analysis of the ALP, refusing to recognize Labor's working-class base in the trade-union movement. To aim to construct an alternative to Lawithout a strategy of intervention in the labour movement, is to reduce the problem of labourism to one of illusions and betrayals.
an analysis has nothing in with Marxism, but relies on impressionistic media pap about Bob Hawke's big business mates. Labor retains the allegiance of the majority of the working class, despite ALP governments, because as a party it is based on the trade unions.
Certainly the nature of the Labor Party has changed over the past decade, but so has the labour movement. For better or worse, the craft union structure has been undergoing a revolution in recent years that is likely to be consummated by huge institutional changes in the near future. The changes in (while it is in government) the changing nature of the trade unions.
In the last election, voting Labor rather than Liberal, National or Democrat was an elementary act of class consciousness for the majority of workers that may be a long way from socialism, but it is nonetheless qualitatively different to the vote by an American worker for the Democratic Party.
The profound dangers of misunderstanding the nature of the ALP were clearly illustrated by the SWP's endorsement of the Democrats ahead of Labor in the election. As the SWP said, such endorsement makes sense if assumed that both Labor and the Democrats are "liberal capitalist" parties, and that electoral assessments based on a "lesser evil" approach.
The Democrats have always been profoundly hostile to trade unions and working-class interests. Their track record on issues such as removal of sections 45D and E of the Trade Practices Act and welfare crackdowns clearly shows they are not a "left alternative" to Labor, but a left, or wet, alternative to the Liberals. Like the Liberal wets themselves, this does not exclude more "left wing" on some issues than Labor. But that is hardly the point.
Rebuilding the left is more urgent than ever
Finally, the far left, including Solidarity, is tiny, isolated, and unable to exert a significant influence on many of the central questions of the day, particularly in the trade-union movement.
Revolutionaries in Australia have not made up the ground lost by the degeneration of the SWP, which resulted in its leaving the Fourth International in 1985.5 An active and interventionist far left would be both a sign of health and an essential component of the workers' movement. Given the likely gravity of the looming international economic crisis, the process of rebuilding is more urgent than ever, whatever its organizational form. * 3. On the formation of the NDP, see /V 67, January 14, 4. CPA-SPA: two groupings resulting from a split in the Communist Party, the former is Maoist and the latter pro-Moscow. 5. See "In defence of the Fourth International — against the split of the Australian Socialist Workers Party" by Erest Mandel, published in /V Special Supplement to issue 93, February 14, 1986.