BY ALISON DELLIT
Watching Kim Beazley fall on his sword on November 10, I was struck by how incongruous this was. Just six months ago, it appeared inconceivable that John Howard could lead the Coalition parties into a third term of government with an increased majority. In every state election and by-election in the last few years, the Coalition has suffered massive swings against it.
It wasn't hard to understand why. During the last six years, life has gotten harder for the majority of Australians. Some are working longer hours; others are living on less money. Public services have declined so much that it takes a week to fix a phone, and is more expensive than ever. Life is more uncertain for most of the old and the sick, and harder for those, almost all women, who look after them.
None of these factors vanished in the last three months. Life didn't suddenly improve. The miraculous recovery of Howard and the Coalition can be put down primarily to two things: racism and the ALP.
'Tampa' affair
These factors collided in August, when the Tampa attempted to reach Christmas Island after rescuing some 400 Middle Eastern "boat people". Faced with an electorate that saw Howard as the enemy, the Coalition spin-doctors saw an opportunity to create a new "enemy" — refugees.
Australia's racist underbelly has never gone away. It has been invoked by Labor, Liberal and National party politicians throughout the last hundred years to make some of an angry electorate to rally in support of nationalistic, white politicians.
But something else happened during the Tampa affair — the ALP was revealed as a bunch of racist or spineless wannabes, incapable or unwilling to pose any significant opposition to the Coalition's xenophobic policies.
It's not as if there was any reason to expect the ALP to be anything else. This is the party that set up mandatory detention of asylum seekers in the first place. The ALP's immigration spokesperson, the rabidly anti-refugee Con Sciacca, even called for harsher treatment of protesters in the centres.
But the ALP's basic inhumanity and blatant disregard for international law during the Tampa affair and since has shocked many of its traditional supporters.
At this point even the corporate commentators could tell that the fun went out of the Beazley/Howard contest. By November 10 most of us could barely give a toss which of them won. Even if it had been Beazley, we would still be fighting a racist government hell-bent not just on persecuting refugees, but on supporting the US war on the Afghan people.
Carr factor
Even the ALP's attempts to paint itself as the party of publicly-funded schools and hospitals had a fatal flaw — NSW Premier Bob Carr. The swing against the ALP in NSW was twice the national average and cost it two seats. The NSW experience of school closures, attacks on WorkCover and crisis-ridden public health services, left working people with little reason to support the ALP and a heightened susceptibility to racist ideas.
That is why Beazley and the Labor Party have to take a big part of the credit for the Liberals' Lazarus trick. It is much easier for an incumbent to win an election when it's main competitor isn't putting up any opposition on the burning political issues of the day.
Of course, the ALP tries to convince us that it's a party of the workers, and thus would have provided a better government for working-class people. And it's true that had Labor won, we might not have been looking down the barrel of a full sell-off of Telstra, possible expansion of the GST, further public sector cuts and more carrots and sticks to force women back into the kitchen and nursery.
But no matter how Beazley tried to re-focus voters' attention on these, and other, domestic issues, most Australians remained fixed on the two burning issues on which there was no difference between the major parties.
On November 8, when the government shamefacedly released the video it claimed "proved" that a boatload of refugees hd thrown their children overboard, only to reveal it showed nothing of the sort, the Laborites were completely unable to capitalise on the this — because they too had vilified the refugees.
This exposure of the Howard government's lie followed the November 7 Sydney Morning Herald's front-page coverage of opposition by former Liberal politicians to the bipartisan policy on refugees. That the ALP was unable to capitalise on this was entirely its own fault.
The large swing to the Greens, and the respectable result for the newly-formed Socialist Alliance, is a heartening sign. In many states it appears the Greens picked up much of the primary swing against the ALP, indicating a strong disgust with the racist and xenophobic policies of the Labor Party.
The collapse of the One Nation vote, which appears to have swung back to the Coalition, is undoubtedly due to Howard's adoption of Pauline Hanson's "turn-them-back-at-sea" policy toward asylum seekers.
If there is one lesson from this election campaign, it is that the trade unions must break with their traditional adherence to the ALP, and start to support a real political alternative. Those unions that, although disagreeing with the ALP's stance on the refugees and the war, poured money into its coffers are as guilty as Beazley in helping re-elect Howard.
This money could have made a real difference to the Socialist Alliance, which had to rely on small-scale fundraising for its campaigns. A donation of just half a million dollars — the amount that the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union's coal division gave the ALP — would have provided enough funds to get the Socialist Alliance's arguments against the war and for better public services funded by increased corporate taxes, into the hands of millions of Australian voters.
Far from playing into the hands of the right wing, electoral support for unequivocally pro-worker candidates like those fielded by the Socialist Alliance is increasingly the only way to get pro-worker arguments out during parliamentary elections. Supporting such candidates would do far more to advance the interests of working people than the unions throwing their resources behind one wing of the conservative, pro-corporate duopoly in Australian politics.
From Green Left Weekly, November 14, 2001.
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