By John Pilger
Australia's history as a political laboratory is extraordinary. In 192O, half a century ahead of Europe and the United States, the silver and zinc miners of Broken Hill won the world's first 35-hour week. Long before most of the world, Australia had a minimum wage, child benefits, pensions and the vote for women. The secret ballot was invented in Australia. "What sort of a peculiar capitalist country is this", asked Lenin in 1913, "in which the workers' representatives predominate in the upper house?"
Certainly, in the 1960s, Australians boasted the most equitable spread of personal income in the world. Perhaps no modern society has achieved this, and none has seen such a prize destroyed in the most spectacular redistribution of wealth since the second world war.
The result of the Australian election reflected this monumental change and loss. The resounding rejection of the Labor government of Paul Keating has been long coming; only an incompetent coalition opponent proposing a wildly unpopular goods and services tax saved Keating in the 1993 election.
The "success" of Australian Labor governments so admired by those in Britain seeking a model for Blair Labour has always been unrecognisable in Australia, where the dislike and distrust of Keating are now matched by a belated realisation of the way his buccaneer, essentially Thatcherite, policies have scarred Australian society.
For the Guardian to claim that Keating "balanced liberal economics with equitable social policies at a time when global orthodoxy said this was impossible" is to display the sort of wilful ignorance that has characterised so much of the coverage of Australian politics, with its agenda of selling Keating as a vehicle for selling Blair. Nothing, it seems, has been allowed to impede the good news from Canberra.
A striking example of this was Martin Kettle's effusive piece last November (illustrated by a kangaroo with Keating as its head and Blair in the pouch). When the distinguished Australian commentator David Bowman, former editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald, wrote to the Guardian to point out, almost incredulously, that Kettle had omitted Keating's responsibility for mass structural unemployment, his letter was rejected.
"It is simply rotten government", wrote Bowman, "to lock Australia, as Keating has done, into an economic policy that depends on unemployment. And your writer thinks Keating represents social justice! His unemployment has run above 11 per cent, the worst since the Great Depression; it is now 8.7 per cent and rising again. This is where ten years of radical economics, of unbridled financial deregulation and excessive tariff cutting, has led. A Labor treasurer, now prime minister, has widened the gap between rich and poor."
Indeed, the truth about the Australian Labor government's famous "consensus" was that it ruthlessly drove people apart. The architect of this was Keating, whose media court (similar to Blair's) dressed up his born-again Thatcherism as economic necessity, and made pop stars out of the cronies and corporate crooks who were the principal beneficiaries of his policies. When Labor came to power in 1983, the combined wealth of the top 200 richest Australians was less than $5 billion. After six years of Labor in power, it was $25 billion. At the same time, wage earners' incomes were cut by 25%, with millions of dollars in wage and tax cuts transferred to profits.
This was the "success" of the Accord struck with the trade unions, of which the Blairites understandably wax lyrical. The collaboration of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, guaranteed by its former leader, Bob Hawke, is indeed a model for a TUC bereft of its traditional policing role of "wage restraint".
When Keating went to the polls, his "big picture", as he liked to call it, was not his "vision" of a republic, nor his "personal ambition" to ban nuclear weapons (while exporting uranium to those who make them), nor his currying of favour with a string of Asian autocrats. It was the 1% of the Australian population in control Of 20% of the national wealth, double the figure when Labor came to power; it was the impoverishment of one child in five; it was long-term unemployment of a kind previously unknown, including up to 30% youth unemployment; and it was Labor-condoned tax avoidance on such a scale that Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation last year paid $A300 million less than the company would have paid, had it paid the statutory rate.
A Freedom of Information Act was enacted, but the freedom to dissent was all but crushed. Under Keating's 1986 Media Bill, the last vestige of genuine media diversity in Australia was wiped out. Television ownership was reduced to a handful of Labor's "big mates"; and in the bonanza deals that followed the leaking of the draft legislation, old Hawke and Keating mates Murdoch and Kerry Packer "received from the Federal Government", according to the Sydney financial analysts County Securities Australia, "a one billion dollar gift". And it was a gift entirely free of tax.
Regulations were bent or ignored so Murdoch could take control Of 70% of the metropolitan press; and Hawke and Keating conducted a Nixon-style vendetta against the Fairfax press, which they regarded as their political enemy, contributing indirectly to the company's collapse. Last year the foreign minister, Gareth Evans, proposed a secrecy law more draconian than any at the height of the Cold War. Journalists who expose murder, bribery and corruption involving Australia's notorious spy agencies are threatened with up to seven years in prison.
With this election, Australia has once again shown itself to be a model, though one far removed from that of its pioneering days of social justice. The profound cynicism that Australians now feel about their politicians is even more palpable than in Britain, and due largely to the legacy of the Hawke and Keating years.
In Australia, people know there are no longer essential differences between the main parties: and on this alone, Labour voters in Britain have much to learn from them. Certainly, their disenchantment is yet another indicator that liberal societies everywhere are being returned to what the Guardian calls a "global orthodoxy", with its demands of political uniformity and obedience and its subjugation of people's lives to familiar power, regardless of its new set of managers. [This article first appeared in the March 8 New Statesman & Society.]