A contradictory
Trame winced visaian polites il HE answers to those questions need framework of Australian politics in this vast country which began its "modern" existence as a penal colony and developed later as a colonial settler state of "Mother England" in 1788. Ever since federation in 1901, Australia has effectively been a twoparty state. Government has either been in
WHAT future is there for the forces of the Left in Australia? What the hands of coalitions of conservative parare the major parties on the left and what kinds of progressive social ties, or, less frequently, in those of the
Australian Labor Party (ALP). The conservative coalition of the Liberal and National parties form the federal government today.
Smaller parties, including those of the
Left, have effectively been frozen out of the parliamentary political process. In fact there has only ever been one parliamentar-
Dutch shipping during the Indonesian independence struggle; and the refusal to movements have existed here?
JOHN TULLY* upsurge of the Aboriginal people and favoured the hiring of women in a tradiian from a party to the left of the ALP; handle any cargo or sail any ships for the tionally male area of work. Fred Paterson from the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), who sat in the Queensland state parliament in the 1940s. Although the country's trade union movement largely remains affiliated to the ALP, in recent years that party has earned the sobriquet of "Alternative Liberal Party" and jettisoned its socialist rhetoric.
### Peculiar system
The explanation for the domination of "official" politics by the ALP and the Conservatives lies at least in part in the peculiar voting system for the House of Representatives. Known as "Preferential Voting" (PV) it has nothing in common with the proportional representation systems common in Europe and ensures the dominance of the large parties. Smaller parties have been known to win up to one million votes, yet fail to capture even one House of Reps seat. The voting system for the Senate is on the basis of proportional representation, but with individual states as the electorates and with the same number of senators regardless of the wide differences in population. This has favoured the smaller, more conservative states, but it has also allowed some representation to parties such as the Greens.
The Australian working class has a history of industrial militancy second to none. Melbourne stonemasons won the 8 hour day in the 1850s and by 1920 the miners at Broken Hill had won a 35 hour week. The maritime workers have an exemplary record of internationalism, including taking industrial action to prevent steel being shipped to Japan in the 1930s in solidarity with the people of China; bans on all imperialist war effort in Vietnam. Australia was also the home of what was perhaps the most radical left wing union the world has yet seen. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the NSW branch of the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF), under the leadership of a left current in the CPA, embarked on a startling programme of militant, democratic and socially and environmentally progressive unionism. And nothing was done without the express consent of the members. They were smashed by the combined forces of the state, the employers, and a conservative and ultra-Stalinist group within the union, but not before they had set the standards for what a union should be.
The union was a pacesetter in winning better wages and conditions in what had been a dangerous and ill-paid industry. Flying pickets, mass picketing and construction site occupations mushroomed in an industry previously used to right wing unionism led by gangsters. The union also invented the political term "Green" (which was later taken back to Europe by Petra Kelly). The union placed scores of "green bans" on the demolition and redevelopment of parks, historical sites, working class residential areas and places of environmental significance. Significantly, this was not done by bureaucratic decree. Residents had to first appeal to the union officials and they would then put the matter to a vote of the union membership to decide. In one instance in 1970, workers building an extension to a student hall of residence went on strike to force the university authorities to re-instate a student who had been expelled for being gay. The union was also prominent in supporting the
### Darker side
Yet the history of the Australian workers' movement has a darker side. Right back into the 19th century, the "White Australia Policy" was a central plank of the policies of many unions and of the ALP. Indeed some unions even denied membership to Chinese and "coloureds" claiming that they were fighting to prevent white workers wages from being undermined by "cheap" foreign labour. In some cases these racist restrictions were not removed until the 1960s and it was not until that decade that white ranchers were prevented from paying their Aboriginal stockmen in tea, flour and sugar.
Australia has undergone vast demographic and economic changes since 1945, when it emerged from World War Il as an under-industrialised provider of raw materials for a weakened Britain that was turning elsewhere for its supplies. In 1945 (with the exception of the Aborigines, who were "unseen and unheard"), Australia had a very homogeneous, "Anglo-Celtic" population. It is now perhaps the most multicultural country on earth, with millions of descendants of immigrants from around the world. This was largely inadvertent, and stemmed from the need for labour for growing industry from the 1950s. Anti-communism was strong, in part because of the strong influence of the Catholic Church, but this was reinforced by revelations of the brutalities of Stalinism.
In 1945 the CPA had over 50,000 members and many times that number of sympathisers and members of party "fronts". It dominated the Australian International Viewpoint #321 May 2000 29
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
Australia * history
In 1983 the ALP was again voted into support of a wage claim outside of accord
* Australia Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) through its control of a number of the largest and most powerful unions. Formed in the early 1920s by a fusion of a number of socialist currents, it was a relatively democratic and open organisation before it was "bolshevised" by a Young Guard of keen young Stalinists. All dissident elements, including Trotskyists, had been expelled by the early 1930s, and the party thereafter was 100% loyal to Stalin. Despite this, the party did make headway in the later 1930s, capturing control of a number of major unions and extending its support via a network of front organisations, including the Unemployed Workers Movement and the Movement Against War and Fascism. Yet the great energy and drive of its cadres could not prevent the debilitating effects of Stalinism on the party. After the high tide of 1945, the membership shrank and the party lost control of a number of key industrial unions to Catholic Actionists and other right wingers, who could point to the undemocratic methods of the party, which rigged union ballots and intimidated opponents. The CPA supported the invasion of Hungary by the USSR in 1956, accelerating the party's decline.
### Showdown
Earlier, in 1949, the party had engineered a showdown with the ALP federal government via the coal miners' union (by then under CPA control). Because of what was basically an unwinnable sectarian adventure, the coal miners were isolated from the broader labour movement and defeated. The long post-war boom, which saw Australian workers' living standards rise to almost the highest in the world, further reduced the attractiveness of the party's message and by the 1960s the party had shrunk to a few thousand members. The party split along the lines of the Sino-Soviet rift in 1963, with a minority of members leaving to found the Maoist CPA-ML (which still exists as a dwindling rump today). After this, a more independent-minded group of cadres led by Laurie Aarons gained control of the party and went so far as to condemn the Warsaw Pact's 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. This caused the case-hardened old Stalinists to split away to form a number of splinter groups, including the Association of Communist Unity and, eventually, the Socialist Party of Australia.
These events coincided, however, with
30 International Viewpoint #321 May 2000 a vast wave of radicalisation which spread around the world, including Australia. The Conservative government of the time, led by "Pig Iron Bob" Menzies, committed the country to support for the US in Vietnam and introduced conscription to supply the gained momerum, yid marching in th necessary troops. Opposition to the war streets, striking and occupying buildings, and hundreds, perhaps thousands of young men deliberately refusing to even register for the conscription ballot. Eventually a
OUR LAW
KILLING US
An Aborigine protest majority of the population opposed the war and in 1972 the ALP was voted into federal government for the first time in 23 years. The CPA was able to capitalise on this mass wave of radicalisation, and was itself influenced by it, as we have seen earlier with the Builders Labourers Federation in NSW. Yet it was outflanked on the left by the growth of a number of far-left organisations, including the Socialist Youth Alliance/Socialist Workers' League, which later became the Socialist Workers' Party and then the Democratic Socialist Party. In hindsight it is clear that there was room for much more cooperation between the CPA and the new Trotskyist formations. Clearly, the NSW BLF under CPA-leadership was an amazingly radical union, way ahead of its time, and Jack Mundey and the other BLF leaders were no Stalinists. Sadly, the old hostilities remained and the old divisions were maintained. As the wave of radicalisation ebbed, so did the party's membership and the party retreated from its more left wing positions.
office. The right-wing party leader, Bob Hawke, believed that the ALP government of the early 1970s had been defeated because it was too radical. He was determined not to repeat its "mistakes" and presided over 12 years of relentlessly pro-capitalist ALP government. Under a series of "accords" between the government, business and the ALP-dominated trade unions, wages were effectively frozen and the rank and file were increasingly excluded from decision making in their unions Whereas Gough Whitlam's ALP government (1972-75) had been a government of reform, conscious of the need to raise real incomes and the "social wage", under Hawke real wages plummeted and the incomes of the rich and super-rich grew by leaps and bounds. In 1983 the top ten richest families were worth A$1,255 million In 1998 they were worth AS15,000 million. Party treasurer Paul Keating might have believed his own rhetoric about Australia being an "egalitarian society", but it is unlikely that magnate Kerry Packer was fooled. His wealth grew over the same period from AS100 million to A$5,200 million and is now around AS6,500 million and rising rapidly. As for wages, they made up 63.5 per cent of GDP in 1974-75 and only 51.1 per cent in 198889.
### Massive transfer
This massive transfer of wealth to the rich and super rich was accompanied by widespread privatisation of state assets, including banks and airlines. Even the so-called "Left" in the party has abandoned any vision of redistribution of wealth and socialism. According to party "theoretician" Mark Latham, public sector deregulation and winding back state intervention was a good thing. Latham claims that the structural inequalities derived from class are no longer a problem. We should understand that society is divided between the "information-rich" and the "informationpoor" and strive for "the socialisation of knowledge" rather than the public ownership of the means of production, he says. And this despite all the evidence that Australia is one of the most unequal, classridden societies in the developed world. Trade unions which stood against the "accords" were marginalised and even smashed, as happened to the Pilots Federation when it placed overtime bans in
guidelines.
Similarly, the BLF was outlawed and crushed by an alliance of employers, ALP governments and rival unions. Understandably, union membership fell dramatically over the 13 years of federal ALP government, so that by the early 1990s less than 30% of the workforce was unionised. Although it is quite possible that the ALP will win the next federal elections (which are due at the latest in two years time), there is no evidence to suggest that the rightward drift of the party has been arrested. The party will find itself in office by default, given the almost-unbelievably reactionary nature of the current Conservative coalition government.
The ALP was elected to the state government of Victoria last year and although it has carried out some reforms, it sided with the owners of the state's privatised electricity industry against the workers. The government invoked essential services legislation passed by its conservative predecessors to threaten the workers with massive individual fines and sequestration of their union's assets if they did not resume work. Yet the industrial action was provoked by the company as part of its drive to introduce widespread casual labour in the industry, and even a governmentappointed mediator slammed the bosses for their refusal to negotiate in good faith. The same government recently moved to open up new areas of Australia's rapidly diminishing rain forest to logging. Further, it went back on previous policy and has decided to leave a dangerous toxic chemical dump in the middle of Melbourne's mainly working class western suburbs.
### Rightwards drift
It is an indication of the rightwards drift of the Communist Party of Australia that it had, through some still influential union officials, supported and even drafted the accords implemented by the Hawke ALP government! By 1991 the party was generally regarded as being irrelevant and much of its membership — and certainly its leadership - had given up on any vision of socialism (a state of affairs which was of course accelerated by the collapse of the Soviet Union).
Although it made half-hearted attempts to form a "new left party", it voted to dissolve itself in 1991 and many of its cadres simply dropped out of political activity or drifted into the ALP.
The field was thus left open to the far left, ao the Stalinist rump parties, but none of them has been able to fill the vacuum left by the implosion of the CPA. Perhaps the largest left party is the Democratic
Socialist Party, which was the Australian affiliate of the Fourth International until 1985. The DSP, however, has never been able to gain serious influence in the trade unions and it is regarded with suspicion by many of the activists in the progressive mass movements as a result of its predatory methods of operation and its less than democratic internal style. Many of its members are young and dedicated, and in Green Left Weekly, it has a fairly lively newspaper, but it has a high membership turnover and with around 300 members it is scarcely larger than it was 20 years ago. Perhaps the DSP's largest rival is the International Socialist Organisation, with around 150 members nationally. The ISO has had a number of splits in recent years and is considerably weaker as a result. The other left organisations (including the Stalinist rumps) are much smaller. One of them is the Socialist Party, which is affiliated to the Committee for a Workers International and was until recently called the Militant Socialist Organisation.
### Divided left
The Australian left, therefore, seems smaller and more divided than it has ever hi, ste of thim at beers breakup of "really existing socialism" in the Soviet bloc, and the widespread perception that socialism is an out-of-date dogma that can never work.
And yet there are some optimistic signs too. Union membership might have declined, along with wages and living standards, but despite the most ferocious attacks by neo-liberal governments, the Australian working class has not been given the knock-out blow that the conservatives would like.
In 1998 the federal government conspired with employers and the army to bring in scab labour and lock out a large part of the country's dockers, or "wharfies" as they're known here. The aim was to inflict a historic defeat on what has always been a cornerstone of the militant workers movement. Hundreds of thousands of people rallied to the union and the bosses and the government lost, in that the union
Australia * remained intact.
The MUA has traditionally been a left by the amalgamation of a number of smaller unions, most importantly the Waterside
Workers' Federation and the Seamen's
Union, both of which had been bastions of the Communist Party; indeed the WWF was moulded out of a series of weak provincial unions into a powerful national union by the CPA's legendary "Big Jim" Healy in the 1930s and 40s.
After the CPA split over the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, many of the union's officials went with the new pro-Moscow Socialist Party of Australia (SPA) and this current maintains a strong influence in the union today. The MUA and its predecessors have always been willing to come to the assistance of other workers in struggle; whether those workers were Australian or from overseas. This tradition of solidarity paid off in 1998 and huge numbers of workers turned out to repay their debts and support the MUA. This outpouring of support was profoundly moving and contradicts those pessimists who insist that working class solidarity is a thing of the past. Unionists overseas remembered their support and ensured that the few ships loaded by scab labour could not dock or discharge their cargoes.
### Ultra-lefts
Although the bosses and the government obtained a series of court injunctions barring pickets from entering a cordon sanitaire of 250 metres around the docks, these measures were ignored and the ports were sealed up behind barricades of welded railway lines. Although a very small minority of ultra-lefts spent their time sniping at the unions leadership during the dispute, the revolutionary left by and large stood shoulder to shoulder with the wharfies on the picket lines, organised meetings and collections, and publicised the MUA's case. What is less edifying was the settlement of the dispute, which saw the wharfies give away pay and conditions.
This led to rifts within the union; basically between Stalinists organised in MUSAA (Maritime Union Socialist Activities Alliance) and a militant rank-and-file opposition. The opposition managed to gain 48% of the vote in the 1999 MUA elections and might indeed gain a majority the next time round.
State elections last year in NSW and Victoria saw left wing parties pick up sigInternational Viewpoint #321 May 2000 31