By Chris Slee and Dave Holmes
MELBOURNE — As expected, the March 30 state election returned Jeff Kennett's Coalition government with a slightly reduced majority. The ALP gained a very modest two-party preferred swing of 2.4%. However, fuelled by anger over railway and hospital closures, many country Victorian seats swung strongly against the National Party and the Liberals.
Kennett's victory is quite remarkable given the ruthless offensive the Coalition has waged against the working-class majority.
Under the spurious banner of financial necessity, health and education have been savaged; some 50,000 public sector workers have been forced out of the system; the State Electricity Commission has been flogged off; thousands of workers have been forced onto individual contracts; local government has been forcibly restructured.
Opinion polls have consistently shown that large sections of the electorate disagree or are very uneasy with many of Kennett's policies, especially the privatisation of the SEC and the cuts in social spending.
In the face of the government's record, the election result might seem incomprehensible. However, there is an explanation.
First, big business in Victoria is happy with the Coalition and is not looking for a replacement. This meant that Kennett had vast resources for his campaign: in media advertising, the Liberals outspent the Labor Party by an estimated 15:1 margin! Melbourne's two daily papers both editorialised in favour of the Coalition, claiming that Kennett's harsh measures had been necessary to restore the state's finances.
Secondly, Kennett benefited from a limited upturn in the Australian economy during his period in office. By contrast, the final term of the previous state Labor government coincided with a deep recession following the 1987 stock market crash. Kennett does not deserve any credit for the upturn — quite the contrary. As a result of the Coalition's cuts employment has grown more slowly in Victoria than in Australia as a whole. Nevertheless, the recovery gives some apparent credibility to Kennett's claim to have rescued Victoria from Labor's mismanagement.
Thirdly, Kennett called the election at the optimum moment. The electorate was poll-weary after the federal election and then, a few weeks later, council elections took place across Melbourne. Many people clearly didn't want to think about the whole business any more. Furthermore, Kennett had legislated to shorten the campaign period to a mere 23 days. And, to cap it all off, he deftly exploited the "bread and circuses" effect to distract popular attention from his real record: there was the much-touted Grand Prix, closely followed by Moomba and the opening of the football season.
Beyond these immediate factors, the most fundamental reason for the Coalition's win is the lack of a credible alternative. The ALP offers nothing more than Kennettism with a human face: its record on both state and federal levels remains too fresh in people's minds to inspire enthusiasm.
The former Cain-Kirner ALP government began the privatisation of Victoria's electricity industry, selling the new Loy Yang B power station to US giant Mission Energy. Over its last three years, it reduced the public sector work force by 20,000.
And in this election, after three and a half years of Kennett's brutal cuts, state ALP leader John Brumby offered a miserly $130 million of extra spending — in a budget of some $15 billion, as he liked to point out by way of demonstrating Labor's fiscal dryness!
Another important factor is the extremely limited extent of mass protest against the Coalition's attacks. The huge anti-Kennett demonstrations in late 1992 — perhaps 250,000 people in action across the state — gave a glimpse of what was possible, but the movement was sabotaged by the Laborite Trades Hall Council, whose only real concern was to return the Keating government in Canberra.
In fact, the ALP's grip on the leadership of the trade union movement — the ACTU, the trades hall councils and most individual unions — means that the level of workplace struggles has fallen to record low levels. This also impacts on the broad level of social struggle; a natural ally of the social and community protest movements is today hardly in the picture.
In this context, there is nothing that can counteract on a mass scale the endless propaganda that pours out through the capitalist media. The situation thus arises where large numbers of people suffer under Kennett's cuts but cannot counter the argument that the state's finances can't support health or education systems such as we have had in the past, let alone better ones. Kennett is seen as a strong and effective leader, even if he inflicts some pain.
The way out of this bind is not to turn to the Labor Party — that would be utterly self-defeating — but to build a grassroots union and community opposition to the big business austerity agenda to which both the Coalition and Labor subscribe.