By Peter Boyle
The Howard government returns with very little political legitimacy. That's why PM John Howard is now desperately trying to refashion his image. He's changed! No more Mr Apologist-For-Pauline-Hanson. Now (after he has nearly extinguished native title and gutted ATSIC) he's all for Aboriginal reconciliation. Maybe he'll even acquiesce in formally turning Australia into a republic, for the new millennium, of course.
In the newspapers, we can read the scripts of possible future speeches of the "new" Howard, as they are drafted by a volunteer corps of capitalist media commentators, all squirming uncomfortably on their stash of flimsy arguments about Howard's new mandate.
Howard must change his conservative image of "national identity issues", warns the international editor of the Australian.
Howard's been changing on race for months and now there's a new, softer Howard, discovered Gerard Henderson, of the Sydney Institute, a right-wing think-tank.
Economic rationalism is dead, declared Ross Gittins, the economics editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. He chimed in with Labor's Young Turk-with-the-Sulks, Mark Latham, in a call for a "third way". But it can't be just a copy of Blair's third way (since exposed as dressed-up Thatcherism) or Clinton's (at risk of explosively revealing itself as Reagan-Bush with a messy sex life). It's got to be a "custom-made", Australian, third way.
The question is: who's going to buy the new Howard? We have already experienced last year's image makeover of Howard (from Mr Comfortable-and-Relaxed to Mr Excitement). Is anyone interested? And how well will his posturing on Aboriginal reconciliation sit with the real experience of the Native Title Amendment Act?
Firstly, this is a desperate attempt to try to overcome the basic fact that the Howard's government's second term agenda does not have the support of the majority of the population.
The Coalition's plans for tax reform, further Telstra privatisation, second wave of attacks on workers' rights, uranium mining in Kakadu National Park, public sector job cuts, are all unpopular. Further, the Coalition won government with less than 40% of the primary votes, the lowest Coalition vote since the formation of the Liberal Party more than half a century ago. (Labor lost with 40.8%.)
The Coalition may still enjoy a bit of a reputation as "good managers of the economy", but this won't survive the looming global recession.
This was totally screened out of the election campaign by the major parties and the capitalist media. In this sense, it was a totally unreal election campaign.
The two main protagonists pretended that the big difference was the GST, a reactionary tax that both Howard and Beazley really support. And Howard pretended that he had "stared down the Asian crisis" and "fireproofed the Australian economy" while Beazley promised to get unemployment down to 5% — a target that is unreachable through measures that don't challenge the priority of corporate profitability.
Meanwhile, the IMF halved its world growth forecasts, made just five months before; Russia and Brazil joined East Asia and Japan in recession; and Allan Greenspan of the US Federal Reserve and international financier George Soros warned that capitalism could enter its biggest global economic crisis in a long time.
The severity of the global recession, and just how Australia will be affected, are the subject of a lot of debate and conjecture. But Howard's fireproofing boast is a joke.
The very success of the capitalists' neo-liberal offensive in Australia, under both Labor and Coalition governments, has doubled the share of the economy involved in foreign trade. Financial deregulation, implemented by the former Labor government, has ensured that the shock waves of any global financial crisis will be felt here.
Nobody knows how big the recession will be. That's what is terrifying the capitalists the most, especially because the prevailing wisdom among capitalist economists in the US, until just a few months ago, was that the business cycle had come to an end.
One good measure is how much money has been spent (or promised to be spent) in trying to tame or fend off the global crisis:
- US$120 billion to try to fix the Asian crisis (excluding Japan).
- $940 billion to try to save the Japanese banks. Some international banks are urging that this be lifted to US$1 trillion.
- $6.5 billion to bail out a single US hedge fund, the first major casualty in the US.
- The IMF is trying double its emergency reserves to US$48 billion, to be ready to cope with the next economies that go into a tailspin. The reserves, raised from imperialist governments, were tapped for the first time in 20 years, recently, to make a US$11 billion emergency loan to Russia.
So far the Asian crisis hasn't been stopped, and some leading economists are certain some of the "rescue" deals made matters worse. Wall Street and other share markets are going up and down like yo-yos. And big capitalists, like Rupert Murdoch, are cashing in riskier investments and reducing their borrowings. The big boys are starting to duck for cover.
But even if we were to accept that the capitalist governments and bodies like the IMF were able to flatten the trough of the global recession, make it less severe, by throwing trillions of dollars at the problem, past experience shows that this also tends to lengthen the duration of the recession.
Secondly, these colossal amounts of money used to bail out the capitalists are going to have to be paid for through taxes and more austerity.
As millions of people are discovering in Indonesia, these billion-dollar rescue packages don't rescue the ordinary people; they rescue the big lenders. One way or another, we are going into a situation where unemployment is going to rise, and the capitalists and their governments are going to tighten the screws even more on the working class.
In short, we face a sharpening of the class struggle around the world and in Australia, and an even more difficult struggle by all capitalist parties to contain public anger and distrust.
Howard's new image change is an attempt to borrow a favourite tactic of the previous Labor government (which Tony Blair adopted): if you have to carry out some nasty economic measures and vicious class warfare, try to buy some credit with a few token gestures on social reform.
Howard's problem is that he severely damaged his standing with the liberal intelligentsia in his first term of office.
Howard's attacks on native title, and his refusal to apologise to indigenous Australians for the "stolen generation", were followed by One Nation's dramatic success in the Queensland election. Racism became a major "moral issue" that left the traditional ideological leaders of the system divided.
Prominent church leaders, artists, academics, some corporate chiefs, newspaper columnists, former Labor and Liberal PMs and even the governor-general expressed disagreement with the Howard government on this question.
Howard's conspiracy to destroy the Maritime Union of Australia also backfired and alienated not just workers but, again, some of the liberal intelligentsia.
The "new" Howard is an attempt to buy back some support from this layer. The Coalition politicians recognise that they don't have the support of a majority of the population, but they hope that with the help of key "opinion makers", they might minimise resistance to Howard's big business agenda.
The question is: will the unions and the progressive social movements allow the Coalition to get away with this?
[Peter Boyle is a national executive member of the Democratic Socialist Party. This article is excerpted from a report to the October 17-18 DSP national committee meeting.]