The results of the Lindsay by-election in western Sydney on October 19 mean more attacks on working people with Howard claiming a new mandate.
The strength of the Liberals' victory — a swing in the two-party preferred vote from Labor to Liberal of 4.7%, on top of the 11.5% swing on March 2 — has allowed Howard and his ministers to feel vindicated by the course of politics since the March federal election.
Labor Party figures spent the days following the poll in damage control mode, answering the recriminations inside the ALP, and backing away from pre-poll expectations — mostly emanating from media analysts — that seven months of Liberal attacks on the working class would return some votes to their fold.
In fact, it is more likely that the results confirm the pathetic nature of Labor's discredited record, than they indicate a renewed "mandate" for Howard.
The fact that most of the Howard government's attacks — spending cuts in health, education and social welfare, anti-union laws and continuation of Labor's privatisation program — haven't bitten yet was also a factor in the results. While the Coalition has made their intentions clearer than they were prior to March 2, the budget brutality will mostly not take effect until the new year, the industrial relations "reforms" are still behind closed doors with the Democrats, and most people's chief worry — unemployment — is still being credibly blamed on Labor's governance. Many of the Lindsay voters probably felt there was not yet a great deal to punish the Coalition for.
The lower votes for the Greens and Democrats (only a few hundred) also propelled Howard's claim to a renewed "mandate". The voters, declared Howard, were demanding that the Liberals be allowed to implement their program without opposition in the Senate from Labor (unlikely anyway), the Greens or the Democrats (patchy at best). This is rubbish: Since when has everybody voted the same way for the same reasons in a by-election as they would in a Senate election? Howard's implicit demand that other parliamentary parties ignore the policies upon which they were elected and allow the Coalition a free rein reveals his "mandate" idea as even more absurd than when it was trotted out in March.
While the "swings" against Green and Democrat candidates were relatively small, they do nevertheless reflect those parties' unwillingness or inability to unambiguously voice their opposition, in the parliament or on the streets, to the Coalition's economic rationalist agenda — the Democrats because they half agree, and the Greens, who've been dropped by the media like a hot potato, because they're isolated in parliament without an organised social base to force the issue.
Above all else, the relative failure of the so-called opposition parties stems from the failure of the organised working class and their allies to seriously fight back against the Coalition's attacks.
The sound and fury of trade union leaders in particular has evaporated, leaving most workers', migrant and Aboriginal rights groups with a sense of hopelessness about what can be done. The ACTU's decision to quietly accept most parts of the Coalition's program and rely on the Democrats and Greens to blunt the worst attacks flows from their subservience to the ALP, which they hope will be returned to government after a period in opposition.
For the rest of us, the fight to survive and build a real alternative to the Laborals' conservative program goes on.