Anti-nuclear party shakes up Labor leader, Andrew Peacock, known as the "Sunlamp Kid" or "Andrew Gucci," for his globetrotting, high-society ways, has been given a reprieve from the political knifing which is the usual fate of Liberal leaders who fail to win elections.
The Liberal-National party coalition -
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - A new radical force burst stunningly onto the Australian political scene with the emergence of the Nuclear Disarmament Party (NDP) during the recent national elections, held on a combination of urban business and big rural interests — ran on a platform mixing up some tax cuts with selling off pub-
December 1.
undemocratically high quota of votes required to win a Senate seat — is the huge number of votes won by the NDP, up to three-quarters of a million or 7 to 8 per cent of the total electorate.
The program of the NDP is direct and to the point:
- Close all foreign [i.e. US] military bases in Australia.
- Prohibit the stationing of nuclear weapons in Australia and the passage of nuclear weapons through Australian waters and airspace.
- Stop mining and exporting uranium.
The success of the NDP, including the enormous blaze of publicity surrounding its best-known candidate, rock singer Peter Garrett from the popular band Midnight Oil, has shaken up Australian politics in a way not seen since the days of the Vietnam War.
been drawn into political activity by the NDP campaign.
The effect on a hitherto dull election campaign was dramatic. And the longer-term implications for the class struggle in this country are still being worked out.
Jim MeILROY
As universally expected, the federal election was won by the incumbent Australian Labor Party (ALP) government led by Prime Minister Bob Hawke. However, a mix-up in the preferential voting systhe House of Representatives
Thousands of young people have
But under the leadership of former Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) president Hawke, the ALP moved further away from the party's base and more towards openly embracing Australian big business than any other Labor government since the early 1930s.
This resulted in the remarkable speclic enterprises such as the government airline, TAA, to private business; replacement of the centralised wage-fixing Arbitration Commission with individual US-style company-based wage contracts; attacks on Aboriginal land rights; effective demolition of Labor's new public health-care system, Medicare; stronger anti-union laws; cuts in youth wages; and increases in war spending.
This program, amounting to an Australian mixture of Thatcherism and Reaganism, is probably regarded by most business interests as premature. Hawke's policy of "national consensus" remains dominant for the present.
But storm clouds are gathering over Hawke's project of years of collaboration between labor and business at home, and the Labor government's policy of backing up the war plans of the Reagan administration internationally.
The eruption of the NDP onto the stage illuminated the severe problems facing Hawke's schemes.
Following years of debate on the issue of uranium mining and the presence of US communications bases, there is widetem in (lower house), together with a late swing to the opposition Liberal-National Party coalition, resulted in Labor losing six seats April 15, 1984. Huge peace rallies paved the way for the emergence of the NDP (DR) to finish with a majority of about 16 in the 148-seat lower house.
This swing against the government shocked most commentators, not least the leaders of the ALP, who have adopted very conservative policies in their 18 months in government, hoping to entrench Labor as the country's main governing party for the rest of the decade at least.
Opinion polls before the election predicted anything up to a 5 per cent swing to Labor. Instead, there was a 1.7 per cent swing to the mainstream conservative parties.
This has badly dented the "invincible" image of Hawke, whose personal charisma created by big-business media was relied on almost solely by the ALP right-wing Labor machine to win the election for it.
Like most other trade-union-based Labor or Social Democratic parties around the world, the ALP has a pro-capitalist leadership which subordinates the interests of the mass of workers who support the party to the needs of capitalism -with some reforms thrown in to relieve pressure from working people through their unions. 18 tacle of almost unanimous endorsement of Hawke's reelection by the editors of spread popular feeling that Australia's uranium (estimated at 25 per cent of the
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AUSTRALIA.
These unions have been threatened of Laborism.
world's accessible reserves) should be left in the ground, and that the bases, which are a vital part of the US nuclear war network, should be closed down. The peace mobilised at least 200,000 people last April 15 in huge rallies in all
The anti-uranium movement has powerful support in the trade unions and the Labor Party as well. At the time of its election as the federal government in March 1983, the ALP was committed to a policy of halting all new mines and phasing out established ones.
A July 1984 ALP national conference saw this policy ruthlessly overturned by a combination of the Right and Centre factions of the party against the Left. The conference was heavily dominated by the federal parliamentary machine and the higher echelons of the trade-union move-
Coming on top of the extremely conservative approach of the Hawke government since its election in March 1933, this was the final straw for many Labor supporters and members.
The Nuclear Disarmament Party grew out of this discontent with the ALP leadership's betrayals.
Beginning as a small grouping in the nation's capital, Canberra, the NDP rap idly established vigorous branches in all state capitals and a number of regional townships, including the Labor-supporting steel cities of Newcastle and Wollongong.
At one Garret rally of 2,000 in Newcastle, 600 joined the NDP on the spot.
A newspaper opinion poll shortly before the election indicated that some 23 per cent of the 18-24 age group intended to vote NDP in the Senate. sented almost half the prospective NDP
The NDP, while the best-supported, was not the only left political alternative to Labor to perform strongly in this election.
In the lower house electorate of Sydney, the new Greens Alliance, inspired by the West German Greens Party, took nearly 6 per cent of the vote. And independent Aboriginal candidate Helen Boyle won almost 4 per cent in the seat of Kingsford-Smith.
Boyle's campaign focused on the issue of Black land rights, which are under attack from racist and mining company interests. The Hawke government has lost Aboriginal support by backing down on its pledges to guarantee genuine Black control of their land.
Socialist candidates also campaigned strongly in a number of seats.
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) -Australian section of the Fourth International - ran nine candidates nationally, winning between 1 and 5 per cent of the vote.
In addition to finding widespread interest in socialist ideas during the course of the campaign, the SWP put special emphasis in this election to supporting the NDP and other progressive campaigns.
In South Australia, a new formation, International Viewpoint 14 January 1985 the United Campaign for Peace and Socialism (UCPS), was formed to contest
The UCPS was an alliance of the Socialist Workers Party, Communist Party, Socialist Party and other left organisa-
It ran a Senate ticket in South Australia, the first such united left campaign in recent history. This reflects a wide-ranging discussion about prospects for united action now taking place on the Australian left.
national secretary Jim Percy told Direct Action, in the December 5 issue of the party's weekly paper, that the election result was a "tremendous victory for the NDP."
"The NDP burst through the [undemocratic framework. could become a real viable left force - a force that can't be bought off the way the [liberal capitalist] Australian Democrats have been.
Unlike the Democrats, he said, the NDP was based mainly on former Labor supporters, who "felt the need to create a new party" following the right-wing shift at the ALP national conference.
The NDP's "whole dynamic is different to the Democrats. It is a threat to the establishment.
"That's why the establishment parties gave their preferences to the Democrats, not the NDP," Percy said.
"In the face of all these obstacles, the NDP's success represents an important shift in Australian politics.
"Now there is the task of consolidation, and creation of a viable national party along democratic lines, with real local autonomy and the ability to take local initiatives," he added.
While the success of the NDP was a blow to the Hawke government on one front, Hawke may also face other chal-
Unionists are becoming increasingly restive about wages and other industrial and social issues.
The centrepiece of the Labor government economic strategy since its March 1983 election has been the ACTU-ALP prices-and-incomes accord - essentially a wage-restraint agreement between the unions and the Labor Party.
The accord has been the main instrument enabling the trade-union bureaucracy to keep a tight rein on industrial struggles in the past 18 months. Recent figures show strikes at their lowest overall level for 15 years.
Wages have been effectively frozen for 12 months by means of an Arbitration Commission-controlled wage indexation system, which is rigged to prevent wage outside official six-monthly national wage cases — and by manipulation of the Consumer Price Index to understate the real increase in prices.
Some unions, including the powerful Builders Labourers Federation and the smaller Food Preservers' Union, bucked the system - and have faced attack not only from the employers, but from the Labor government, the ACTU, and other unions.
Peter Garret (DR) with deregistration, which effectively means removal of their legal right to represent their members.
It is notable that the Hawke Labor government has been able to attack unions more freely than the previous Liberalcause of the "special relationship" between the ALP and the unions.
Signs of militancy are appearing also among public service unions and in other
Such developments could spell trouble for the accord and the government in 1985.
All this comes in the context of looming economic problems in the new year. In the past year, Labor has been able to boast of record economic growth, falling inflation, a reduced increasse in unemployment, and high profitability for business as signs of success for its program of capitalist economic recovery.
But recent evidence of a drop in manproduction and other economic indicators points to a likely serious slowdown in the economy in 1985. With signs of stagnation in the US economy, the prospects for the Australian economy
The combination of economic troubles, renewed union militancy, and the rise of antiwar sentiment among youth, casts serious doubt on the Labor government's strategy for stabilising Australian capitalism by class-collaborationism over an extended period.
The challenge facing the left and labour movement is to unite the various forces radicalised by the crisis into a movement capable of offering a serious alternative to the pro-big-business policies
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alliance soon after it was formed, eventually receiving a derisory 105 votes in the election.
Alexis is notorious for the alacrity with which he offered his services as prime minister 24 hours after the US