Sarah Stephen
Many people will approach this federal election campaign with cynicism and resignation, and who can blame them? It can seem a depressing prospect: four more weeks of election advertising, during which the major parties will make all sorts of promises that they have no intention of keeping. Meanwhile, the corporate media creates the illusion of a presidential-style contest between two men who have little to differentiate their policies.
But this election campaign has the potential to be a little more interesting. The Coalition government is seriously on the nose; PM John Howard is in big trouble for involving Australia in a war based on lies, and for lying about refugees.
But what's new? Ask anyone and they'll tell you that politicians always lie. The difference this time around is that the response to those lies has taken the form of mass social movements, against war and in solidarity with refugees, and it has given people confidence that we can make the Howard government pay for those lies.
In the past couple of years, the deep discontent among broad sections of the population has spilled over into grassroots organising across the country — rallies and public meetings, a multitude of action groups and church networks, film showings and letter-writing campaigns.
The depth of this discontent has affected a section of the conservative elite, which is deeply uneasy about the extent to which Australia's system of government is being undermined in the eyes of the majority. The first potent manifestation of this was the letter signed by 43 prominent Australians, released on August 8, which argued that Australians must be able to trust that their government will be truthful.
This letter was cited as the reason Queensland Liberal Party branch chairperson Russell Galt came forward with the revelation that Liberal Senator George Brandis had referred to Howard as a "lying rodent" and complained that "we've got to go off and cover his arse" in the children overboard inquiry. This piece of truth was too much for the party, and Galt looks set to be expelled following the election.
Another expression of the elite's discontent is former Liberal Party president John Valder's "Not Happy John" campaign, aimed at unseating Howard in Bennelong. An August 24 launch of the campaign, which will support Greens candidate and former intelligence officer Andrew Wilkie, was attended by 400 people.
The revelations on August 16 by Michael Scrafton, an adviser to former defence minister Peter Reith, that Howard lied about asylum seekers throwing their children into the water, may tip the balance against the government in this election campaign. A Morgan poll conducted on August 18 found that 60% of people believed they had been deliberately misled by the PM over the children overboard incident. Latham's approval soared to 58%, while Howard's remained at a low of 47%.
In what he thought was a clever move against Scrafton, Howard arranged for the officers who conducted a 2001 military inquiry into the children overboard incident, Major-General Roger Powell and Commander Mike Noonan, to be interviewed about the evidence Scrafton had given. He expected that Scrafton had told this inquiry as little as he had told the departmental inquiry run by Howard's closest adviser, Max Moore-Wilton.
This backfired badly. According to Vice-Admiral Russ Shalders, who conducted the interviews, "Powell deduced that the Prime Minister should have been in no doubt that the claims [of asylum seekers throwing children overboard] had no basis". Noonan concurred. Howard could have withheld news of these interviews, but probably calculated that it would have been far more damaging to him if the information was leaked during the election campaign.
Four of Howard's advisers did hear the conversation between Scrafton and Howard on November 7, 2001. According to Scrafton, Howard repeated what he told him, as if to make sure others in the room could hear it as well. Predictably, Howard refused to allow them to testify at the re-opened Senate inquiry, but instead released statements by them which more or less backed his version of events. It didn't look convincing. Pollster Gary Morgan commented on August 20 that not allowing all public servants to appear before the Senate inquiry "would put him in the same position as an Olympic athlete refusing to take a drug test!"
Howard has tried to dismiss the whole children overboard issue, claiming that people are "bored" with it and that it's "ancient history". Michelle Grattan referred to this as "bluff" in the August 28 Melbourne Age: "It would be the ultimate irony if we in the media first failed to get to the truth of 'children overboard' in the last election campaign and then, having now had it thrust in our collective faces by Scrafton, swallowed the PM's lie that the issue was old news."
Despite things looking this bad for the Coalition, Howard decided to call the federal election for October 9. Perhaps he suspected that things could only get worse. Perhaps he wanted to avoid at all costs the reconvening of the Senate inquiry into the children overboard incident.
Howard could have waited until September 5 to announce the October 9 poll, but calling it on August 29 allowed him to dissolve parliament early and limit the Senate's sitting days to allow only one day of Senate inquiry hearings on September 1.
When Howard declared that this election will be about trust, people all around Australia probably rolled around laughing. This is a dangerous gamble given that his own credibility is on the line.
So if we dump Howard, can we put our trust in the Labor Party?
In the 2001 federal election, Labor helped to re-elect the Coalition when it refused to take a stand against the attacks on refugees after the Tampa incident. Labor was incapable or unwilling to pose any significant opposition to the Coalition's xenophobic policies, and there is no indication that anything has really changed.
Neither can Labor be trusted to carry out its promises. Our system of government holds neither major party accountable. A government which refuses to carry out pledges made during an election campaign cannot be recalled, except by waiting until the next election to vote it out (an illusory means of accountability when the media reinforces people's short memories and ensures that all treacheries are forgotten).
Additionally, the relentless attacks on working people by the former Hawke-Keating federal government and the current Labor governments in all states and territories provide little doubt as to what we can expect from a future federal Labor government.
Latham started out looking as if he might be a bit better than Howard, but then we were subjected to one back-flip after another: the sell-out over the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, the announcement that only a few troops would be withdrawn from Iraq by Christmas, support for the US-Australia free trade agreement (albeit with some minuscule amendments), endorsement for the government's attacks on same-sex marriage and full backing for the latest round of "anti-terrorist" legislation.
Only a strong left vote can force Labor to be better than Howard. Without that pressure from the left, a Latham government will be just like the Hawke and Keating governments. The more a Labor government depends on Green and Socialist Alliance preferences to get elected, the more likely it is to deliver a few reforms and the more nervous it will be about attacking our rights.
An increasing proportion of the population, fed up with Labor's shift to the right and the illusion of choice offered by the two-party system, are voting for a third party. At the last federal election, nearly 20% of voters gave their primary vote to a smaller party before Labor or the Coalition.
The broad pro-refugee and anti-war movements are organising dissent and having an impact at the parliamentary level, represented by a significant and increasing vote for the Greens. An August 28 Morgan poll put support for the Greens at 9%. An August 27 Newspoll put their support at 6%. In some inner-city electorates, the Greens anticipate receiving the second-highest number of votes. This election could see the Greens displace the Democrats, who are only managing to poll between 1% and 2%, as the third force in parliament.
Uneasy about their increasing weight, Howard made a public attack on the Greens on August 31, warning conservative voters who were thinking of voting Green that the party had some "kooky" policies, highlighting their support for drug decriminalisation.
The emergence and growth of the Socialist Alliance, grouping together the majority of socialist organisations and individuals across Australia, has also been significant. The alliance has played an important role in the anti-war movement and in defending and reviving militant and democratic unionism. Socialist Alliance is now undertaking the biggest socialist election campaign in decades.
As the backbone of many of the grassroots anti-war and pro-refugee social movements, and the growing militant wing of the trade union movement, the Socialist Alliance provides a voice for those struggles in this election.
A decent vote for the Socialist Alliance, alongside a strong vote for the Greens, will be important in shifting politics in this country to the left.
Something that reinforces a certain conservatism among the population is the minute differences between the two major parties. When both parties agree on the need for draconian new "anti-terrorism" laws, many people find it hard to imagine an alternative approach. When both parties agree on the essentials of the free trade agreement with the US, many people resign themselves to it. When both parties agree that mandatory detention is an essential pillar of Australia's "border protection" policy, many people struggle to understand how that could be wrong.
However, as the voices of those parties with a dramatically different set of policies start to get more of a hearing, it broadens the scope of debate and widens the range of possibilities. As the vote for the Socialist Alliance and the Greens increases, and their arguments in defence of civil liberties and against mandatory detention develop more prominence, it starts to make decent refugee and anti-war policies thinkable.
From Green Left Weekly, September 8, 2004.
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