After winning two stomping majorities in a row, Victorian Labor’s winning streak may be in danger, as opinion polls show both major parties are on the nose. This has prompted former Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett to call for an alliance between the Coalition and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (PHON) because polls show a swing to them.
A February 2–8 Roy Morgan poll put the far-right racist PHON second, just four percentage points behind Labor. One test will be how it fares in the South Australian elections on March 21. The Victorian elections are on November 28.
The 2022 election was a landslide for Labor; it won 56 seats of 88 in the Legislative Assembly, compared with 28 for the Coalition, which lost most of its metropolitan seats. It was Labor’s second landslide, increasing its majority after people rejected the Coalition’s anti-lockdown stand in favour of Labor’s COVID-19 response and its “Big Build” road and rail infrastructure promises.
Labor had also hinted at, but not promised, recreating a State Electricity Commission, a state-run renewable energy corporation and associated infrastructure.
It was enthusiastically supported by Labor’s base, but nothing has been done. “This is because Labor remains fixated with neoliberalism,” Sue Bolton told Green Left. “As many people are now beginning to realise, it has abandoned working people, helping to feed the despair that is fuelling the rise of the far right.”
Bolton is a long-time councillor at Merri-bek City Council and is running for Socialist Alliance in the seat of Broadmeadows.
One of the clearest examples of Labor’s willingness to align itself with big money is its decision to eradicate public housing, Bolton said. Before Premier Daniel Andrews retired in 2023, he announced that 44 Henry Bolte-era public housing towers, which are currently home to more than 10,000 people, would be demolished.
The towers are relatively comfortable and, importantly, their rents are limited to 25% of people’s income. There was no engineering assessment to validate the claim that they are no longer fit-for-purpose, nor to estimate the cost of upgrading.
Later, Premier Jacinta Allan’s government admitted that the new replacement dwellings will be “social housing”, run by private not-for-profit organisations.
“The towers are, to varying degrees, a little dilapidated,” Bolton said. “But this could be fixed with some investment in maintenance and repair.”
Labor has also embraced the discredited Thatcherite assumption that only the private sector can manage services efficiently.
It privatised the land registry and Melbourne Ports for an immediate cash injection but reduced revenue and services over the long term. It even proposed to privatise the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, until a public outcry and a Community and Public Sector Union campaign forced it to back down.
Private ownership
In civil construction, Labor favours private ownership and control over serving the public. VicRoads, once a government department that actually built roads, had thousands of skilled and experienced engineers and builders. Those functions have been almost completely handed to private companies and some specialised authorities. The Department of Transport and Planning is a skeleton of what VicRoads used to be.
Now, private consortiums are allowed to build and maintain roads, which they do as cheaply as possible, as part of “public private partnerships”, which means the state does not have to pay a cent up front, but is on the hook for hundreds of millions of public dollars each year for 25 years.
Private toll road operator Transurban built the unpopular West Gate Tunnel Project for $12 billion. It was promoted as necessary to reduce trucks in the inner west. In return, Transurban was granted permission to toll the road for 20 years, and to extend tolls on the Tullamarine Freeway for another 10 years.
“Labor is also cutting the public school sector by $2.4 billion — despite its rapid growth,” Bolton said. “This means Victoria is delivering the lowest public education funding of all states, according to the Australian Education Union, and thereby has to rely on private schools to educate a new generation.”
Federal and state Labor have also allowed the Cohealth community health services to decline to the point that the board threatened to slash services, including general practitioners, unless it received more federal funding.
A vigorous campaign forced a reprieve on cutting GP services until the middle of this year, but the Cohealth board is cutting nursing and cheap pharmacy services at its Fitzroy and Kensington sites, as well permanently closing its Collingwood site.
“Labor is also showing its authoritarian streak by passing laws in which children can be tried in adult courts,” Bolton said. Allan had promised to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 12, but retreated in the face of the Murdoch-inspired scare campaign.
“The bail law changes have led to overcrowded cells, and remand prisoners have become so lost in the system they cannot even be found for court appearances.
“The laws are also racist, as they disproportionately affect First Nations people.”
Anti-protest laws
Allan’s new draconian anti-protest laws ban the use of lock-on devices (often used by climate campaigners) and ban protests near places of worship — restricting many protests in the CBD. Community opposition to the proposal to ban face masks has been successful and, so far, Labor has rejected introducing permits for protests.
“The community is crying out for real change,” Bolton said. “As the cost-of-living and housing price rises add extra strain to ordinary folks’ budgets, all we see is more of our money being siphoned off to big corporations and the wealthy, while the government moves to try and shut down our concerns.”
Bolton said it is no surprise polls are showing a rapid rise in support for PHON. “Plenty of people are so fed up with the major parties and, as they are removed from politics, they mistakenly think that by voting PHON they are giving the middle finger to the status quo.”
“This is why Socialist Alliance is standing in the Victorian elections. We’ve got solutions that include repairing and uplifting the public housing towers. PHON actually supports the neoliberalism of the major parties, but instead of coming up with solutions, they are happy to scapegoat migrant communities and minority groups.
“Now is the time to talk about why we need to transform society so that a rich country, and state, does meet ordinary people’s needs. This is where Hanson’s extreme right-wing populism falls apart because she supports the status quo, while pretending she doesn’t.”