By Peter Boyle
The Democratic Socialist candidate for the Wills by-election, Bob Lewis, has condemned the latest ACTU call to cut immigration as a "thinly veiled appeal to racist sentiment" and a "total cop-out on seriously addressing unemployment".
"All the major parties are scapegoating migrants for this recession, which is a direct result of the unbridled greed of big business in the 1980s, and now the ACTU has joined in the chorus", Lewis told Green Left.
"Cutting immigration won't create jobs, but it can distract public attention from the failure of the major parties to come up with real solutions to unemployment. The ACTU and the Labor government used the Accord to push the line that sacrificing wages and working conditions would protect jobs. That failed miserably, and now they say cutting immigration and restricting family reunion for migrants of non-English speaking background is the solution. It is nonsense calculated to tap fear, ignorance and racial prejudice."
Lewis says that counterposing jobs and immigration "is as false as counterposing jobs to environment protection. The truth is we can create jobs by fixing up and protecting the environment, and the only reason this is not popular with the powers that be is because big business thinks it can make bigger profits by wrecking the environment and cutting jobs."
He argues that "environmental responsibility is simply non-negotiable. We have to start shifting to public transport, renewable energy, recycling, timber plantations instead of logging the forests that are left, reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We have to do it now or threaten human survival on this planet.
"This urgent task can create useful jobs for everyone. But the policies that make big business profits the real 'Priority One' are getting in the way."
Lewis believes there is growing public disillusionment in the economic "rationalist" policies pushed by both Labor and Liberals. But he says it's not enough simply to restore heavy protection of Australian manufacturers through tariffs, quotas and subsidies.
"That is not going to be sufficient to stop rising unemployment. If we are serious about addressing the unemployment problem, then the labour movement, the green movement and other progressive forces have to push for a shorter working week with no loss of pay.
"We have to stop privatisation and launch a massive public works campaign to seriously tackle the environmental challenge and to meet the urgent need for more and better education, health, housing and welfare services. That is a real program to tackle unemployment.
"The logic of the labor movement coming behind a campaign to subsidise and protect Australian manufacturers is the same logic that rifice more, accept lower wages, work for longer hours and ultimately accept job cuts. That logic ultimately threatens jobs, working conditions, social services and the environment."
The growing number of people who want an alternative to the "Labor and Liberal no-choice", he said, are looking for a broad democratic alliance that has a truly alternative vision of society. Single issues, mere protest votes in the hope of changing the ALP's direction, were not enough. "The left, green and progressive movements need to do some serious alliance building around a program for a society where human needs and the environment rather than profits determine the way things are done."
Lewis, a socialist and antiwar movement activist since the early 1970s, currently works for the RMIT Student Association. His preferences will be directed first to progressive independent Phil Cleary, then to the Australian Democrats, followed by the Labor Party.