BY ALEX BAINBRIDGE
HOBART — The state conference of the Australian Labor Party will be held at the prestigious Wrest Point Casino on the weekend of August 11-12. As is typical at these conferences, it will be an opportunity for Labor leaders like Kim Beazley and Premier Jim Bacon to parade in front of the media in search of votes.
What will not be on the conference agenda will be any consideration of how to rule Tasmania better from the standpoint of the interests of most of its voters. Labor's agenda — here as elsewhere — is economic "rationalism", plain and simple.
The Bacon government was elected in 1998 amid a blaze of controversy because of Labor's role in combining with the Liberals to reduce the number of parliamentarians. This achieved the two major bosses' parties' goal of reducing Green representation in parliament and allowed Labor to win government with a comfortable majority of seats — if not a majority of votes.
It was the first time Tasmania had a "majority" government for almost a decade. Prior to that Labor and then the Liberals had to govern with support in some form or other from the Tasmanian Greens. "Stable" government was required, according to Labor, the Liberals, business organisations and the establishment media, in order to pull Tasmania out of the doldrums. "Stable" government — a euphemism for government without the Greens — was achieved but the doldrums remain.
Tasmania is plagued by high unemployment, a net decline in population and other effects of a depressed economy. Labor doesn't have a plan that could really fix these problems but instead continues to seek large-scale business investments. None of these have yet born fruit, although a couple are still in the pipeline.
Alongside the high-profile, big investment projects (like Crest, Basslink), the government has pursued other capitalist "solutions". These include supporting tourism attractions like the arts festival "10 Days on the Island", and giving assistance to a range of specific, smaller business ventures, such as assistance to Impulse Airlines.
Inevitably, the search for capitalist "solutions" has been accompanied by an ever growing series of attacks on the quality of life of ordinary people.
Labor's attacks
Certainly these attacks have generally been implemented in the style of Labor "consultation" instead of a Howard- or Kennett-type frontal assault. Nevertheless, this does not make the content of the attacks any less devastating.
When examined together, the list is quite appalling — privatising the Trust Bank, introducing a Kennett-style workers' compensation system, closing the only state-funded child-care centre in Tasmania, allowing nuclear warship visits in violation of its election platform, closing one primary school, presiding over record levels of woodchipping of old-growth forests, ignoring election promises to decriminalise marijuana and remove anti-abortion laws, threatening to close a women's shelter, doing nothing about chronic underfunding of the state's health system leading to a blow-out in hospital waiting lists, bowing to business pressure to gut relatively progressive industrial relations legislation and closing the Royal Derwent Hospital.
Labor has introduced some progressive reforms. Teachers, for instance, have gained with a slight increase in teacher numbers, a significant reduction in the proportion of temporary (as opposed to permanent) teachers, improved transfer policy, assistance for isolated schools and a salary package linking wages to mainland levels.
However, these reforms are not enough to explain Labor's continuing high standing in the opinion polls. Instead, this support is explained by the dismal performance of the Liberal Opposition.
Time and again, the Liberals have stood up in parliament with what they seem to imagine will be a devastating blow against the government, only to be discredited because they haven't got their facts straight.
Even the establishment media have repeatedly bemoaned the fact that Peg Putt, the sole Greens lower-house MP, is a more effective parliamentary critic of Labor than the 10 Liberals combined.
The Greens have effectively used their media influence to campaign on a number of important issues: opposition to woodchipping and replacing old-growth forest with plantations and opposition to genetic engineering most prominently. Further, they can generally be expected to make progressive criticisms of Labor's worst moves.
As a result, the Greens are rebuilding their electoral support after sharp declines in the 1990s. Earlier this year the Greens polled higher than the Liberals in Putt's electorate of Denison and last year came second to Labor in the state upper house seat of Wellington.
However, while the Greens may often take good positions on issues that come up, they do not put forward a realistic or comprehensive alternative vision for society. The Greens' alternatives are always vague and partial. For instance, they present eco-tourism or organic agriculture almost as panaceas.
The reason for this is that the Greens confine themselves to solutions that do not challenge the capitalist private profit system. This was clearly revealed in the Greens' response to the Liberals' election pledge to sell Tasmania's publicly owned hydroelectric power system — the Hydro — and Labor's promise not to. The Greens advocated leasing the Hydro to private corporations, not as a compromise, but as their preferred policy!
A major justification for this policy was the supposed "need" to retire state debt — a justification that reinforced the Liberals' privatisation plans. Incredibly, the Greens argued that Labor was being irresponsible in its promise to maintain the Hydro in public ownership — hypocritically presented by Labor as a stand against privatisation.
No alternative?
The Liberals and Greens argued that there was no alternative to their policies of selling or leasing the Hydro in order to get increased government revenue for public infrastructure spending. They both argued that Labor would be forced to privatise the Hydro in order to get these funds. (The Greens suggested that if Labor didn't privatise the Hydro, it might privatise state forests — the other major government asset.)
Within the parameters of capitalist democracy, Bacon came up with a comparatively original alternative policy — extracting greater profits from the Hydro by rescheduling Hydro loan repayments and extending a 5% levy imposed by the previous Liberal government on Hydro customers. Thus the allegedly impossible was achieved — the Hydro remained in public hands and the government coffers received a boost.
Similarly, there are numerous ("creative" or "original") alternative policies that would be open to a government genuinely concerned about the interests of ordinary workers, students and welfare recipients. Bacon's Hydro policy still imposed a relatively heavy burden on ordinary consumers — 5% on top of Tasmania's already high electricity bills — but this was because Labor rules in the interests of the capitalist class. By contrast, a socialist government would utilise measures that make the rich pay instead.
Consider the example of electricity prices. Tasmania has steeply regressive electricity prices where households pay exorbitant amounts but the businesses that use the most electricity receive generous discounts. A fairer arrangement would be to give everyone a certain amount of electricity (essential in today's society) for free but charge gradually increasing prices for those who use more than a reasonable amount. Big business would pay the most.
A socialist government would also end the widespread practice of granting massive subsidies to big business, including those like Renison Bell which gratefully take the money, then proceed to sack workers. Subsidies are particularly notorious in the woodchipping industry. And how can there be any excuse for cutting payroll taxes by millions of dollars like Labor did in the last state budget while one hospital in north-west Tasmania has had to close a ward because of lack of funds?
Further, ordinary people are in no way responsible for much of the government debt. The infamous Forestry Tasmania is now debt-free because all of its debt was transferred to the state debt in the early 1990s. Royalties paid by Forestry to the government since then are nowhere near enough to cover that debt, forcing ordinary people to pay yet again.
While they may make all sorts of excuses to justify their economic "rationalism", in reality there are no insurmountable obstacles preventing any government with the political will from beginning to implement a social justice agenda. Naturally, any government that did so would come under intense pressure from the capitalist class and would hence need to mobilise the mass of ordinary people in its support.
Nevertheless, the fact that Jim Bacon heads an economic "rationalist" government and not a social-justice government only proves that this former militant unionist is now ruling — and making excuses — for the bosses.
[Alex Bainbridge is a member of the Socialist Alliance and the Hobart branch secretary of the Democratic Socialist Party.]