By Steve Painter
The onset of recession has brought a surge of very dishonest, demagogic politics in the big business media. Greens, Aborigines and immigrants are the main targets of this politics of cynicism. "If today a political party is prepared to go boots and all for 'jobs, jobs, jobs,' then all the caterwauling of the environmental activists, the Aboriginal activists, and so on will not stop that party romping home in any election fought on the issue", writes John Stone in the February 6 Australian Financial Review, celebrating the victory of the Liberal Party in the February 1 Tasmanian elections.
Stone is by no means the only one campaigning around such views. In fact, it sometimes seems that much of the big business establishment and its bought politicians and journalists find it difficult to refrain from open celebration that the recession has come along to force a dose of economic "reality" down the throats of Australians who support environmentally sustainable policies, justice for Aborigines "and so on".
There is no small irony in this, as those who created the recession with a decade of irresponsible financial speculation and disastrous economic policies attempt to shift the blame for the present situation onto those fighting for a different direction, as well as more traditional scapegoats, particularly immigrants.
Despite having almost everything their way for most of the '80s, mining, agribusiness and other industrial lobbies are still smarting from the handful of defeats they suffered, and now they see their chance for revenge. A few successful Aboriginal land rights claims, the Wesley Vale and Coronation Hill decisions against the forestry and mining lobbies, Greenpeace's campaign against Nufarm, and a few other incidents are being forged into a legend of big business grievance against the alleged injustice of minimal limits on the power of big money.
This is accompanied by the inevitable threats of capital flight. We're repeatedly warned that environmental impact studies, Aboriginal land claims, and cleaner environmental standards could drive new developments overseas. The latest shot in this campaign is a report that new clean air standards would bankrupt the Australian steel industry. If John Stone and friends are to be believed, it would seem industry remains in Australia only out of some sense of philanthropic duty.
Yet business does stay, and there is incessant pressure to log more forests, blast and rip up more sacred sites, allow more poisonous emissions into the atmosphere. The real issue is not development or no development, but who gets what out of it. It's just the traditional big business drive to maximise short-term profits with little regard for any other criterion but the accountant's balance sheet.
The strongest sections of business have always used recessions and depressions, which are a normal part of the capitalist economic cycle, to strengthen their position against labour, business rivals and political opponents. It's a fair bet that few tears were shed in the boardrooms of GMH, Toyota and Ford over the recent demise of Nissan.
Since the Tasmanian election is fast becoming the latest chapter in the big business legend, it's worth looking at just what did happen there. According to the legend, Labor got what it deserved because of its treacherous alliance with the Greens.
In reality, large numbers of voters turned against Labor because of its economic rationalist policies, and the Greens suffered because of their association with Labor. The Field government pursued the harshest austerity policies of any state government, and the Liberals swept to office promising some relief from those policies — John Stone's "jobs, jobs, jobs".
In the coming months it will be interesting to see how many jobs materialise, or whether the Liberals simply take over Michael Field's economic policies. The promised pulp mill in the north of the state, supposedly a victory over the demonic greenies, will deliver only a comparative handful of the promised jobs, if it goes ahead. (It should be noted that the Tasmanian Greens do not oppose all pulp mills, but merely the more environmentally destructive options in the most sensitive locations.)
The Tasmanian economy has been weak and relatively depressed for decades, long before the green movement became a powerful political force, and Aboriginal land rights claims have never stopped any large developments in that state. Will Ray Groom's government solve the state's economic problems by ripping into the environment? The moonscape of Queenstown, the scars of abandoned mine workings dotted over the west coast, stand as testimony to the failure of that approach for most of the past 200 years. It's unlikely it will suddenly begin to work in the few years before the chance comes to toss out Groom at the next elections.
Much is made of the fact that the Greens also lost votes in Tasmania. Part of this can probably be put down to Liberal protest voters returning to the fold, and part is undoubtedly due to the Greens' persistent weakness on social justice and economic issues. But does it really mean that most Tasmanians want their wild forests turned into cardboard boxes? Only in the more extravagant fantasies of John Stone and Co.
For as long as this recession lasts, and that's likely to be quite some time, we'll hear a lot more of this demagogy, which mainly takes the traditional White Australia forms of migrant- and Aborigine-bashing, together with the more recent addition of greenie-bashing. In Biblical times, the members of some Middle Eastern tribes used to symbolically load their sins on a goat — the scapegoat — which was then cast out to fend for itself in the wilderness. For some, little has changed, it seems.