Lisa Macdonald
In early September, National Party leader and deputy prime minister John Anderson said of the Australian Greens: "This idea that they are some warm, nice midway house between the Coalition and the Labor Party overlooks the fact that actually they are a home for people who in the 1950s would have joined the Communist Party. They are watermelons, many of them — green on the outside and very, very, very red on the inside."
While there are members of the Australian Greens who regard themselves as socialists, neither the party's policies nor its leaders are socialist. Anderson's accusation was, as Greens leader Senator Bob Brown noted in a September 7 media release, simply a scare campaign.
Asked at the National Press Club in Canberra on September 8 to respond to Anderson's comments about the Greens being closet socialists, Brown responded by saying this was "ideology of the past", and "we have to move on from that". He described himself as "a social democrat".
Brown did not go on to explain what he meant by this. But in responding to a September 2 attack on the Greens' taxation policy from the Business Council of Australia (BCA), which represents Australia's 200 largest corporations, Brown recommended the assessment of the Greens' economic policy made by Queensland University economics professor John Quiggin in the July 29 Australian Financial Review.
Quiggin, who describes himself as a "social democrat", wrote in the AFR: "Supporters of market-oriented policies and unfettered competition will reject the policy outright. It is a traditional social-democratic policy, based on values of equality and community, of the kind that Labor might have put forward before it became more concerned about aspirational swinging voters than about its core supporters."
That is, the Greens do not seek to abolish the capitalist private-profit system. Rather, they seek to make it "fairer" for working people.
Brown made this clear in his September 2 press release responding to the BCA's attack on the Greens. The BCA had falsely accused the Greens of advocating raising the corporate tax rate to 49%. This was its rate prior to the "economic rationalist" policy agenda introduced by the Hawke-Keating Labor government in the 1980s and early '90s, which cut the corporate tax rate from 49% to 36%. The Coalition government has since reduced it to 30%. The Greens advocate a modest increase in the corporate tax rate, raising it to 33%.
"Australia's tax levels are low by world standards and expenditure on public services, like education, and infrastructure like rail and public transport lags international standards", Brown stated, adding: "The Greens stand for fair taxes and decent levels of public service, starting with redirecting the government's $14.7 billion tax cuts for high income earners to public health and education, including abolition of HECS."
Thus, contrary to Anderson's claim, the Greens are not "a midway house between the Coalition and the Labor Party". The policies they advocate place them to the left of the pro-corporate "free market" Coalition and the ALP.
The Greens oppose both of these parties' orientation toward lowering the amount of tax paid by upper-income earners and corporations at the expense of public spending on social services that benefit working people.
However, in rejecting the goal of replacing the capitalist economic system with socialism, a system based on meeting human needs rather than corporate profits, the Greens are inevitably driven to present themselves as "responsible" managers of the capitalist economy.
"The Greens economic policies are coherent and environmentally, socially and fiscally responsible", Brown declared in his September 2 media release. "The Business Council should look at the Greens stoic insistence on tough budget measures in Tasmania from 1989-92 to see how sensible we are as managers."
This was a reference to the Labor-Greens Accord in Tasmania following the electoral defeat of Premier Robin Gray's Liberal government in 1989. Under this accord, the five Green state MPs agreed not only to back Premier Michael Field's Labor government during confidence votes but also to support Labor's budgets, the first of which involved massive spending cutbacks and the sacking of 2000 public employees.
Brown told the National Press Club: "We found that the Liberal Gray government had left a $100 million deficit. So there were savage budget cuts. We had Greens' supporters protesting outside our offices. We went to some very angry public meetings, but we Greens held the line."
This was a clear signal by Brown that when it comes to the crunch, Green MPs are willing to sacrifice their goal of making the capitalist system "fairer" for working people in order to demonstrate to the capitalist establishment that they are capable of being "sensible" managers of their economic system.
The Tasmanian Greens not only did this during the 1989-92 accord with the Field Labor government. In 1996, they ensured the passage of a state Liberal government's budget that included a 4.1% cut in health and community services, with the loss of at least 700 public employees' jobs.
The Tasmanian Greens MPs rationalised their support for the Field government's budget cutbacks as a "realistic" way to get a number of environmental reforms, in particular a promised limit on the state's woodchip exports of 2.889 billion tonnes per annum. However, while the Greens upheld their part of the accord, the Labor government reneged on its forest protection promises.
Ironically, before he became a Green, Bob Brown provided an example of how to actually win environmental protection legislation through his leadership of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society's successful 1976-83 mass extra-parliamentary campaign to save the Franklin River. This campaign demonstrated that genuine reforms are most effectively won, not through parliamentary deals, but through the mobilisation of public opinion in rallies, marches and other forms of mass action.
[Lisa Macdonald is a national convenor of the Socialist Alliance.]
From Green Left Weekly, October 20, 2004.
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