Peter Boyle
The pollsters and bookies were right after all. The Liberal-National coalition won the election comfortably, increasing its House of Representatives majority. It also has a good chance of controlling the Senate with the help of a new right-wing Christian fundamentalist party, Family First.
Fear and greed did the job for PM John Howard. His campaign played on the interest rate anxieties of folk burdened with huge home mortgages, and he topped it up with some $6 billion worth of bribes, which will most benefit the already very well-off.
Latham promised that a Labor government would stick to the neoliberal script in economic policy, but critical swathes of voters in marginal seats were persuaded not to risk a change in "economic managers" and were blackmailed into trying to placate the corporate gods with yet more tax cuts and profits-first policies on matters such as industrial relations and the Kyoto greenhouse protocols.
But there is good news for the progressive side of politics in the further advance of the Greens who have decisively displaced the Australian Democrats as the third force in federal parliament. The Greens won 716,253 first preference votes in the Senate (with 80% of votes counted) and in several lower house seats won up to 20% of the primary vote. Together with the Socialist Alliance's 10,263 Senate votes (and 11,683 votes in the lower house), and that of other progressive parties, this made up a decent progressive vote.
The Greens won 8% of the lower house vote across the nation, up 3%, but failed to hold its only lower-house seat, Cunningham, which it won in a by-election in 2002. However the Greens may increase their Senate numbers from two to as many as five.
The Greens have been the only parliamentary party to consistently take progressive positions on key political issues such as the war on Iraq, the environment, health and education.
While Labor leader Mark Latham raised expectations with his promises to bring Australian troops home from Iraq by Christmas, sign the Kyoto Protocol, defend Medicare and to save Tasmania's old-growth forests, each of these promises was hedged. Only some of the military detachments in Iraq would be withdrawn, the public-health crisis would only be patched and even his much-vaunted forest pledge was to call for another inquiry into the issue.
During the election campaign both Labor and Liberal leaders tried their best to avoid discussing the war on Iraq. Latham was only prepared to speak about increased military intervention "against terrorism" in South East Asia.
Another major moral issue that has polarised Australia — the mandatory and indefinite detention without trial of asylum seekers who enter Australia "illegally" — was also screened out of the election debate. It was left to parties like the Greens and the Socialist Alliance to raise the issues of war and refugees.
If the Coalition ends up controlling the Senate, we can expect the Howard government to go on an offensive on several fronts. Even before Howard claimed victory on election night, Coalition ministers were raising the possiblility of privatising the remaining half of Telstra and the banks were salivating at the prospects of more market deregulation.
Given the escalating war in Iraq, it is possible that Howard may respond positively to a US request for more troops.
Workers also face a new wave of anti-union legislation and a renewed push for individual contracts in the workplace. The High Court has recently sought to make all political and solidarity industrial action illegal, and militant union leaderships like the construction division of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union are likely to come under greater attack.
Howard does not really have a mandate for these attacks because he did his best to keep such issues out of the campaign, focusing on the various election bribes instead.
What this will mean is that resistance to these attacks will now have to be waged outside parliament, in grassroots community campaigns. If people want to stop these attacks — and surveys show that we have clear majorities on our side on all the big issues of war, refugees and the environment — then they will have to take to the streets again to resist.
The networks are there for a people's resistance to Howard's agenda. Activists all around the country have been patiently building them up over the last few months. We saw these networks in action at the October 1-3 "End the lies" protests and we will see them at work again over the coming months.
Before these elections, hundreds of thousands of people who disagreed strongly with Howard's pro-war, anti-social and anti-environment agenda hoped that the job might be done through the ballot box on October 9. They were disappointed.
The electoral system is rigged in favour of the ruling corporate elite. The ALP "opposition" was never a real opposition. It continues to share the Coalition's neoliberal, corporate-first ideology and agenda. The real opposition over the next period will be made in the streets.
From Green Left Weekly, October 13, 2004.
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