You can't leave it to parliament
@box text int = When the Kennett government was first elected in Victoria, it announced a series of cutbacks and attacks in rapid succession, hoping that any potential opposition would be stunned into inaction.
Despite an initial outpouring of public protest, the leadership of the trade union movement largely stood by and watched Kennett implement his attacks.
Because the trade union leaderships were mired in the political ideology of parliamentarianism, they did not see that the members of their trade unions, if mobilised, had the power to stop the Kennett juggernaut.
The union leaders' illusions in the thoroughly undemocratic and unrepresentative institution of parliament led them to rely totally on the Labor Party, a party which supports the basic thrust of Kennett's social and economic agenda, to represent in parliament the interests of working people.
This blind trust prevented union leaders from understanding that the only social force with the power to stop the attacks is the working class itself. If workers — the majority of the population — were organised, they could simply refuse to implement the "reforms". That would be democracy in action.
As the mass organisation of the working class in Australia, the trade union movement has the power and the responsibility to organise the whole working class to defend its interests. The desertion of trade union leaders at the most crucial time meant that Kennett was able to get away with most of his attacks.
The same mistake was made when the Howard government was elected in 1996. It was able to implement most of its agenda, despite not having a majority in the Senate.
Labor and the Democrats have since proven that they are thoroughly unreliable defenders of working-class people: the Democrats voted for the Workplace Relations Act and threw their support behind the goods and services tax (with food exempted), and Labor voted for the majority of Howard's anti-native title legislation.
Despite winning only a minority of votes in the latest federal election, the Howard government is confident that it can implement its agenda through parliamentary wheeling and dealing and buttering up the opposition parties. However, because it doesn't want to leave anything to chance, it plans to rush as much legislation through the Senate before those elected last October take their seats in July.
The government wants to rush through the GST legislation without scrutiny, axe 5500 jobs from Centrelink, cut youth wages, abolish Abstudy, remove ATSIC's responsibility for Aboriginal housing, restrict the number of workers who can access unfair dismissal laws, force young unemployed people to do literacy tests or risk losing the dole, extend the work for the dole scheme to people up to the age of 40, implement a second wave of tough industrial laws and give the go-ahead for more uranium mines.
It's not too late to stop these projects — as long as we don't rely on the tame parliamentary parties to save our skins. Given the Democrats' and Labor's record under Howard, hoping that the new Senate will save us after July is pie in the sky.
The union movement needs to stand up and refuse to implement Howard's policies, regardless of whether they are passed in parliament or not. Workers have the ability to stop the production of profits and make government unworkable — but only when they are organised and their confidence to take such action is systematically built.
The public support for the maritime workers in 1997 expressed working-class opposition to the Howard government. That sentiment needs to be built on.