By Max Lane
As the first parliament under the Howard government gets under way, everybody is waiting to see how Howard's axe will fall. Howard, industrial relations minister Peter Reith and treasurer Peter Costello have already done a lot of groundwork for a systematic attack on the wages, welfare and rights of working people. They have already delivered a few chops to the neck of ordinary people, such as implementation of the threat to make migrants wait two years before they become eligible to receive unemployment benefits.
The numerous by ministers in the last few weeks have made it clear that there is no area of social welfare or workers' income that will avoid being hit. Even a partial list is horrifying.
- People seeking unemployment benefits can be subject to investigation simply on the undocumented allegations of a telephone accusation by a boss.
- Workers will lose a whole gamut of conditions when the government legislates new minimum awards, forcing workers to individually negotiate back the conditions taken away.
- Commonwealth public service jobs are being slashed in some departments by up to 20%.
- Government ministers are even refusing to guarantee that funding for old people's hospitals, universities, migrant and other services will not be cut.
The government will soon begin in earnest its systematic two-pronged attack on wages and conditions on the one hand and government services and welfare on the other. It will be the biggest attack on the quality of life of working people ever deliberately carried out by an Australian government. How does the government think it is going to get away with carrying out such social vandalism?
Reliance on 'mandate'
The political strategy of the Howard government has two main components. Firstly, even before the results of the polls were formally announced, Howard raised his claim to a "mandate". At his victory speech on election night he claimed a mandate, not for his agenda as advertised in TV commercials and campaign speeches, but for his real agenda.
Its campaign emphasised Coalition support for existing welfare policies such as Medicare. But Howard claimed a mandate for a policy that would not be a "pale imitation" of the previous government. He singled out industrial relations as the symbolic issue that characterised the direction of his government.
The big business media immediately took up his claim and have been echoing the talk about "mandates" ever since. This strategy is aimed at putting all opponents permanently in the position of accepting the general directionof government policy. Anybody who accepts this claim of the government's right to govern according to its "mandate" inevitably has to restrict criticisms to fine tuning or has to find "solutions" to social problems within the government's framework.
Many organisations, including the Labor "opposition", have already done this. Both Beazley and ALP left leader John Faulkner have emphasised that they will not be obstructionist and will let the government govern where it has a mandate.
They dispute on this or that issue, such as the sell-off of Telstra, whether the government really has a mandate. But their general stance legitimises and indeed strengthens the government's hand in pushing ahead in the direction it wants. This is not surprising, since it is the same direction that Labor was heading in anyway, albeit in a more step-by-step manner.
Even the ACTU has made noises about accepting that the government has a mandate for industrial relations changes. The ACTU attempts to counter this by highlighting the government's pre-election promise that no worker would be worse off.
A position that the change is all right as long as nobody is harmed is obviously ridiculous. The ACTU knows this too, as it is still compelled to take some "action". Interestingly, the ACTU's own non-obstructionist line has forced a new twist in its political party orientation. One of the ACTU's so-called actions now is a petition campaign aimed at proving to the Australian Democrats and Greens that there are sufficient votes in the industrial relations issue to motivate the Democrats and Greens to stand firm against the government's industrial relations changes.
The line has already begun to introduce all kinds of ambiguity into the positions of the trade unions. In a statement on "meeting the challenge of the Howard government", Stan Sharkey, CFMEU national secretary, wrote in April, "The trade union movement [must] coexist with all political parties and trends, but particularly the government of the day. We therefore will not initiate or participate in any provocative confrontation with the government."
Sharkey goes on, of course, to say that the trade unions will fight back if attacked. But this stance gives all the initiative to the government. Despite the fact that the government is telegraphing what its punches will be through every communications means known, the trade unions, says Sharkey, will not "initiate" anything because the "democratic processes of society" require that we "coexist" with the government.
The same stance has also been adopted by bodies such as the Australian Council for Social Services. This is reflected in its willingness to reconsider the regressive goods and services tax.
Divide and rule
The Coalition has also been very alert to the need to keep people who will be affected by its policies pitted against each other. The "mandate" strategy is mainly aimed at those institutions and leaders who claim to represent workers, people needing welfare assistance and so on. The actual victims of job cuts, wage cuts and welfare cuts are less likely to accept this mandate.
Symbolising the essence of this divide and rule approach is Howard's linking of the sale of Telstra with the funding of environmental conservation programs. This tactic endeavours to pit environmentalists against defenders of the public sector and Telstra workers.
Unemployment benefits are not delayed for everybody (yet), but just migrants.
Mass lay-offs in the public sector will initially be achieved through the ALP government method of voluntary redundancies, pitting workers who may be seeking a way out of the public service against people who want to defend the positions and future working conditions and who therefore want to prepare now to fight.
In this case, the national CPSU leadership has fallen into the divide and rule trap by advocating a position of no real action against the government until involuntary redundancies start. This position, which is also characterised by the same "don't initiate anything" approach advocated by Stan Sharkey, prevents a united fight against the involuntary abolition of jobs. The voluntary redundancy of individual workers still means the involuntary redundancy of actual jobs. The union is standing by, allowing the government to pave the way for both getting rid of positions and sacking other workers later.
At the job level, the government has already moved to assist individual bosses in pitting worker against worker, as when Peter Reith intervened in court in the case of the Tweed Valley Fruit Processors.
The government, the media and big business will continue their campaign that it is illegitimate to question the direction of government policy. The government and the bosses will take every opportunity to pit one group of workers against another and one public interest sector against another.
United resistance
The early signs are that what remains of the traditional left in the ALP and trade unions is not responding effectively to this challenge to fight against the direction of government policy. This is already clear from the stands taken by the ACTU and the national leadership of the CPSU. The talk from the ALP left about the need to consider a GST indicates that it too will continue to accept the prevailing policy dictum that the wealthy and big companies cannot be called upon to fund welfare policies.
The Democrats have had some success in cultivating an image of resisting the Howard government's direction, especially by holding firm on their opposition to the Telstra sale. To what extent they retain this image in the short term will be determined by their positions in the Senate on other Howard cuts.
In the medium term, the Democrats' opposition to compulsory unionism, solidarity strikes and other measures that would strengthen unions in a period when a strong union will be the last line of defence for many workers will reveal them as an ineffective defender of workers' interests.
Although it is very early days in the Howard government and the axe has not yet fallen in many areas, it is already possible to see how the struggle for a united fight back might develop. In the CPSU, a small network of militant activists, many involved in the public service worker opposition group Challenge, have tested out support for a campaign of industrial action.
Strong votes for Challenge-supported positions, including majorities at some mass meetings last week, revealed a sentiment for action amongst government workers. The potential for building a strong and united campaign within the union has been revealed.
This will be the real basis for the building of a militant and effective opposition to the Howard government's attacks over the coming period: building a united fight back amongst those willing to fight, with or without the support of the traditional "representatives" of the workers or of other areas of discontent.
Any broader reconstitution of a popular opposition at the level of mass campaigns around basic social issues, such as privatisation, or in the electoral sphere, will not proceed very quickly if it is not linked to efforts to resist where the attacks are most immediately felt.
Effective resistance against cuts to the public service, that is a resistance which means that there are no cuts, will mean a fight against the general direction of government policy. Any real resistance on the job moment will be a direct challenge to the government's so-called mandated policy direction. A popular opposition can hope to succeed only if it recognises that social advance is not possible within the framework currently accepted by both the Coalition and Labor.