It has now been six years since a federal Liberal-National Coalition government was elected.
During these six years, the government, aided and abetted by the Australian Democrats, has:
- introduced anti-union legislation so severe that workers need to break the law just to organise an effective picket line;
- sold off a third of Telstra, resulting already in higher costs, worsening service and debacles like the One.Tel collapse;
- introduced a thoroughly regressive tax system, facilitating a further shift in wealth from poor to rich;
- slashed university funding, forcing more and more students to pay their own way at university while increasing subsidies for big business-funded and -controlled research;
- attacked land rights legislation, slashed the funding of the Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Commission, and run a vicious propaganda campaign aimed at blaming the indigenous community for problems caused primarily by dispossession;
- made it easier for highly educated, mostly white, workers to move to Australia and harder for less educated, mainly Third World workers, and striven with every mechanism available to prevent refugees from gaining the right to political asylum in Australia, ensuring that those who do gain asylum have to suffer so much here that it is scarcely worth it; and
- denied thousands of needy people access to welfare, and forced many thousands more to work for below subsistence wages on "work for the dole" schemes.
These attacks, along with many not listed, are designed to create an "easier" climate for big business at the expense of the living conditions for most of us — minimising business tax, making it easier to push down wages and extend working hours, opening up previously publicly run industries for profit making opportunities, creating a pool of desperate, low paid and discriminated against workers and minimising social spending in favour of maximising business subsidies.
But these policies, whether called economic rationalism, corporate globalisation or neo-liberalism, are not unique to Australia nor are they exclusive to the Coalition parties.
Labor no different
It was an ALP government that began the wave of privatisations by selling off the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas. Bob Hawke's government used the Prices and Incomes Accord with the ACTU to limit workers' wages in the interests of big business profits.
Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating brought in legislation denying indigenous people the land rights that were recognised in the Mabo case. Keating also lowered company tax, and attempted to win support for a Goods and Services Tax.
The restructure of the university sector, including the introduction of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme and the introduction of full postgraduate fees, began under Labor. And the ALP made it harder for the poor and uneducated to move here.
Thus it is no surprise that the ALP has failed to mount any real campaign against even the most vicious attacks of the Howard government, refusing even to repeal the hugely unpopular GST. The ALP, despite its working-class rhetoric aimed at keeping the unions on side, is thoroughly supportive of the bosses' economic rationalist rampage.
With both the parties of the corporate elite fully committed to their interests, this paper has always argued the need for an electoral party to represent the interests of the majority.
Greens limitations
Our sellers are frequently approached on the street by people who believe Green Left Weekly should, or in fact does, support the Australian Greens.
In Australia the Greens have opposed the worst economic rationalist legislation that has passed through parliament.
But they do not advocate the replacement of the system which creates these "excesses" with a radically different system — one in which the working people democratically control economic life. Instead, the Greens seek to use the existing institutions of capitalist "democracy", parliament above all, to ameliorate capitalism's "excesses".
This approach inevitably will lead — and has already led — the Greens to accommodate to the interests of the corporate elite. No Australian Greens leader, for example, has criticised the participation of their German sister-party in a governmental coalition that has supported military attacks against Iraq and Serbia, and the use of riot police to suppress anti-nuclear protesters.
The biggest opposition in Australia to the corporate-driven attacks on ordinary people is not the Australian Greens. It is the tens of thousands of activists who came out at S11 and M1 to oppose capitalism's economic restructuring.
The Greens will never be the voice of this movement, nor do they aim to provide a unifying force amongst anti-capitalist forces. In fact, the Greens exclude much of the organised left from their membership.
A unifying force
Green Left Weekly began publication in 1991, with the aim of promoting discussion, debate and unity in action within the left. We believed, and still believe, that maximum co-operation between left organisations and individuals is essential to oppose capitalism's relentless attacks on working people.
The Socialist Alliance brings together, for the first time in Australia's history, all the significant anti-capitalist parties in Australia. It is an attempt by the left to put petty disputes and mistrust aside in order to build an effective working-class electoral alternative.
Although primarily an electoral party, Socialist Alliance holds no illusions in parliament. It aims to use electoral campaigns to build mass anti-capitalist struggles. The Socialist Alliance is explicitly anti-capitalist and pro-worker — not only in its platform, but also in its practice.
The Socialist Alliance's aims are similar to the aims of Green Left Weekly. That is why we are supporting the Socialist Alliance. We urge all our readers to join the Socialist Alliance, get involved and help us to build and strengthen the movement for progressive change in this country.