One year too many
Sunday, as we have all been repeatedly reminded, was the first anniversary of the election of the Howard government. For big business and its media, it was an occasion for taking stock of what the government has "achieved", and what further it might do to benefit the wealthy minority at the expense of the rest of us.
Business, according to Michelle Grattan and Karen Maley, writing in the February 24 Financial Review, gives the Coalition government "a 7-out-of-10 rating" but is eager for Howard to display more "vision".
By "vision", big business means that the government has to "follow through on freeing up the labour market, and do more to create a climate of investment confidence", to use the words in the article of Commonwealth Bank chairperson Tim Besley. Similarly, Geoff Allen of the Allen Consulting Group was quoted as saying, "To keep business on side, the challenge [for the government] is now to establish and clearly explain an agenda for continuing reform going into a second term and even beyond".
By now, everyone should be aware of what these phrases really mean. "Freeing up the labour market" means rolling back the right to organise, so that employees, as individuals, "freely" bargain with their bosses. "Reform" means what honest people call "reaction": cutting social welfare, restricting union and democratic rights, shifting even more of the tax burden from the rich to working people — and using racism and scapegoating to deflect popular anger. And investors' confidence is directly proportional to their belief in the government's ability to get away with carrying out that kind of program.
After one year of Howard, investment confidence must be considerably higher than most would have predicted on March 2, 1996. The government has done a great deal for its mates, at remarkably little political cost.
It has put through savage budget cuts in social welfare areas, generally in violation of campaign promises. Its Workplace Relations Act has outlawed union solidarity and laid the groundwork for forcing individual contracts on a growing section of the work force. It has taken big steps towards the eventual privatisation of the education system and the ABC, not to mention admitted privatisation targets such as Telstra. Its "environmental" policies are increased woodchipping and open slather for "development".
Despite all this, and more, the Howard government remains "popular" in the polls — well ahead of the nominal opposition, the ALP. The reason is not hard to find: in the last year, there has been little sign of an alternative.
From the start, the parliamentary ALP, acknowledging Howard's "right" to govern, pledged to pass the budget; in effect, it promised to oppose the government only on measures it knew it couldn't defeat. It can only tut-tut about marginal issues because it shares the Coalition's loyalty to the welfare of business.
Most unions have been equally docile. The ACTU's one show of opposition, the August 19 rally in Canberra, frightened the "leaders" so badly that they dropped any pretence of trying to organise further opposition. The peak environmental organisations alternate between lobbying government MPs and lobbying business — that is, asking both to be something different than they are.
Reactionary governments are not defeated by waiting for their policies to anger the public. Without active campaigns against those policies, they begin to appear inevitable even if not desirable (thus Margaret Thatcher justified her reactionary program with the line, "There is no alternative").
Waiting is a recipe for allowing the Howard government to go on implementing its reactionary "vision". If the unions and social movements don't begin to fight back now, they will have to do so another year or two down the track, and from a much worse position.