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Workers Power Global, Melbourne
With more than half the votes counted, computer predictions forecast the three-party coalition government should have a majority of at least 10 seats. Howard has won a third term having looked down and out six months ago.
Much of the blame has to go to the Labor Party, led by Kim Beazley. Faced with a vicious right-wing racist campaign against asylum seekers by Howard, Beazley offered no alternative while lamely saying he wished to talk about other issues.
This allowed Howard to draw behind parts of the blue collar workers, the traditional supporters of the Labor Party. Significantly, support for Pauline Hanson's anti-immigration party, One Nation, fell right across the country.
The Socialist Alliance was standing and Workers Power backed its campaign. It did not have the resources to stand in more than a scattering of the Federal seats, but it put up senate teams in all the states - and this is an important sign of the Alliance's seriousness about building a new force to the left of the current parties.
The Socialist Alliance was the only organisation running in the elections with a clear stance against the war, and in support of refugee rights and the opening of the borders. These are the big issues that both major parties have developed an unholy consensus on.
On domestic issues the Socialist Alliance also had a much better platform.
This is not simply because individual parts of the platform sounded better - its because the Socialist Alliance recognizes that the real power in society is not in parliament but on the streets and among the organized working class and other activists who are prepared to act for change and not just fill in a ballot paper once every four years.
But we also believe that Workers Powers programme takes this several steps further producing a coherent plan of linked demands - a transitional programme - that takes the needs of today and links this tightly to the fight for workers control and socialism.
In the 2001 Federal Elections this is what the ALP claimed to stand for and what the Socialist Alliance did stand for on several key issues. We also include the Workers Power programme on these questions, taken from our Action Programme "The Socialist Solution to Market Madness".
The key to winning any of these demands on a permanent basis is organised action, mobilising the power of the working class and workers control. This is the basis our programme.
TRADE UNIONS
Labor:
Protect 100 per cent of workers' entitlements when the employer becomes insolvent.
Strengthen the independence, authority and resources of the industrial umpire to safeguard the wages and conditions of employees.
Strengthen the award system to guarantee decent wages and conditions of employees.
Establish an industrial inspectorate to ensure awards and agreements are properly enforced.
Boost resources to protect workers' occupational health and safety.
Socialist Alliance:
Every worker should have the right to join a union and oblige their employer to recognise and negotiate with the union.
Unions should have the right to gain access to workplaces, to inspect company plans and books, to strike, to picket effectively, and to act in solidarity with other unions or social causes.
Repeal anti-union laws, the Workplace Relations Act and sections 45 D and E of the Trade Practices Act. No individual contracts. Stop the attacks on workers compensation, increase the entitlements for injured workers.
Workers Power:
Down with all IR Laws! We fight to repeal the Workplace Relations Act and to prevent its replacement with any system of arbitration or other bosses' court. Workers must have complete freedom to organise and to fight.
Strikes, Occupations and Pickets: We have to fight the anti-union laws now with strikes and pickets that will be deemed illegal. This will need solidarity strike action across workplaces, industries and the whole class.
The IR laws are a class-wide attack - we must have a class-wide response. A general strike to smash the IR laws was necessary at their introduction - it is necessary now.
If we stop society with a general strike then we will have to run it for our own needs.
Such action would meet severe opposition from the police. In order to defend our actions we will need our own defence. Democratic workers defence organisations must be formed to defend our actions, demonstrations, strikes and occupations.
WELFARE, HEALTH AND EDUCATION
Labor:
New Medicare will cut waiting times in public hospitals with more beds, more doctors, more nurses and new medical technology. Medicare-After- Hours will work around the clock to make sure families have access to the care they need, when they need it.
(Beazley) will make sure all Australians get a quality education.
Australia must become a Knowledge Nation, so we can keep new ideas in Australia and make sure our industries lead the world.
Socialist Alliance:
End government funding of private schools, hospitals and health insurance.
Fund Medicare not private health funds. Expand public services. No to privatisation, keep Telstra and Centrelink under public ownership; reverse the privatisation of Qantas, the Commonwealth Bank, airports, electricity and the CES.
Workers Power:
A Living Income for all: A social minimum income for everyone, set at a level decided by committees of workers.
A decent income for pensioners and welfare recipients, and the extension of welfare benefits, including free public transport and cheap and accessible accommodation. All such increases in benefits and pensions to be paid for by steeply progressive taxes on the rich.
Free Public Education: Student strikes and occupations and unity with staff when they take industrial action are the most effective ways of fighting back.
Occupations mean that schools and tertiary institutions stay open, putting the people who really understand education in control.
All education must be free and accessible. No public funding to the wealthy and elite private schools - all public money must be fed back into public education and extra resources delivered. Education at all levels must be run by the people who best understand it - those who work and learn in the sys-tem.
Free Quality Healthcare: No public money for private healthcare or insurance.
Medicare must be fully funded from highly progressive taxa-tion so that it provides free quality care.
It is the people who work in the health system and those who use the system, who know best how it runs and how to make it run better. Healthcare must be run by them.
The best, safest medication, with the least side-effects must be the one prescribed and all medication must be free.
DEMOCRACY
Labor:
Respect and support for inter-nationally recognised human rights is fundamental to an equal, just, democratic and tolerant society, and inherent to the dignity of each and every Australian.
Respect for the individual and collective rights of others is essential to the protection and promotion of human rights.
Human rights are essential for the maintenance and enhancement of democracy and peace. Labor wants Australia to reassert its role as world leader in the promotion and protection of fundamental human rights both domestically and internationally.
Labor believes that all Australians have a right to equality before the law, to the due process of the law, to protection against discrimination, to freedom of thought, con-science, speech, association, religion and peaceful assembly.
Socialist Alliance:
For a democratic republic with representatives receiving no more than a skilled workerâs wage. End racist harassment of Aborigines and ethnic groups.
Disarm the police to stop police killings
Workers Power:
For a Workersâ Government: If a workers government relied on committees and bills in parliament it would be out of office. It couldn't be like a "normal" government that works with the bosses and their unelected state machine.
Banks and multinational giants are controlled by a hand-ful of people who are account-able to no one. A workers' government will strip these people of their assets so it can begin to plan the economy on the basis of producing for need, not profit.
For Workers' Power: A workers government would rest on the other source of power in society. The working class.
This government would be run by workers' councils and defended by the armed power of workers themselves. It would be a government that could defeat the bosses and their state with workers' power and open the door to a new society: socialism.
INDIGENOUS RIGHTS
Labor:
Exercise and enjoy the distinct rights which attach to indigenous Australians as a group, as descendants of the original owners of this continent; share in and contribute to the economic and social advantages available to all Australians as citizens of a first world nation; Exercise their right to self determination within the Australian nation; exercise and enjoy their unique cultures; and share with other Australians the real, practical benefit of reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.
The rights of traditional owners in relation to access and development on their land; protection of sacred sites; and the existence of adequately resourced Land Councils with statutory responsibilities for the representation and protection of Aboriginal interests in relation to land.
Socialist Alliance:
Repeal Howard's ten-point plan and extend native title; restore the right to veto mining on Indigenous land. Negotiate a treaty recognising prior ownership and Indigenous land rights.
Increase funding for, and Indigenous control of, community services. Abolish mandatory sentencing.
Apology and full compensation for the stolen generations.
Workers Power:
Land Rights Now! We fight for the rights of indigenous people to the use of traditional lands for whatever purpose they deem appropriate.
We support the right of indigenous people currently calling for a treaty to do so but recognise that no treaty with the racist White Australian state can bring justice. Instead treaties are the road to legalism and protracted court battles.
The way forward remains the occupations of stolen land, the tent embassies and militant protest. We support the right of indigenous people to self-determination, meaning the full right to decide over their own lives and land - up to and including the right to their own separate state, if this is their will.
REFUGEES
Labor:
An Australian Coast Guard. A comprehensive plan to crack down on the people smugglers and send the illegal immigrants back to Indonesia for proper refugee processing by the United Nations.
Socialist Alliance:
Close the detention centres; end mandatory detention Full rights for asylum seekers and migrants; abolish the two-year waiting period which pre-vent newly arrived migrants accessing social security End all deportations.
Remove all restrictive and discriminatory immigration regulations; abolish the pro-business "points" system. Funding and specialist services for resettlement. Unlimited and free English classes.
Full citizenship rights including the right to vote for all refugees and migrants, with abolition of the temporary protection visa.
Workers Power:
No Immigration Controls. Open the borders. If the boss-es profits can travel the world freely, so must we. All workers must have the right to travel to where jobs and conditions suit them. Free the Refugees. Stop One Nation. We fight to close every detention centre, resist every deportation and fight to allow every migrant full access to housing, work, social security and the benefits of citizenship.
Wherever One Nation gains popularity there is an increase in racist attacks and physical abuse. This is why we take on One Nation wherever they meet, organising mass protests and shutting their meetings down. More importantly we argue for No platform for fascists.
This means we must mobilise to stop them every time they meet, to drive them physically off the streets.
WAR
Labor:
An international intelligence, police and military effort against those who committed the atrocities in New York and Washington and those who supported and harboured them. Labor will support this in a bipartisan fashion and will see this through should we win office later this year.
Socialist Alliance:
No to War, No to Racism. Stop Australia's export of military hardware, personnel and training. Solidarity with Indonesia's peoples, not its military and police. End ANZUS. For a nuclear-free Pacific. No to APEC
Workers Power:
Defend Afghanistan, Defeat US imperialism. Troops out now. Not a dollar, not a person to the "Defence" Forces of Australia. This military machine only serves to defend the interests of Australian capitalists, both here and overseas.
SOCIALISM
And when the word socialism was entered into the search engine on the ALP site...No documents have been located for the specific search query you entered.
Socialist Alliance:
In parliament, Socialist Alliance candidates would use their position to give a voice to workers' struggles and social movements, fight reactionary policies and promote the mass campaigns that can defeat the attacks on jobs and living standards.
A movement for change must be built by developing policies, campaigns, industrial struggles and co-operation with all workers, environmental, anti-racist, and other social movements and to put forward an alternative to corporate control of society.
A sustained mass campaign of total opposition to the ruling class offensive can bring together the forces to replace capitalism with a socialist society, based on co-operation, democracy and ecological sustainability.
Workers Power:
Workers' Councils of Action. In every locality, city or town councils of action need to be built. They need to be made up of delegates drawn from all those fighting for working class people's needs. They will be elected in mass meetings of their constituents.
Alongside such organisations the working class would need to build a means of protecting them - a workers' militia.
Councils of action and workers' defence squads would exist alongside the capitalists' government, its army and police force. The capitalists would immediately recognise the threat that dual power represented to their rule. The situation could not last for long: one or the other power would have to triumph.
This means winning the rank and file soldiers to the workers' side, helping them to organise rank and file soldiers' committees, to secure the democratic election of their officers, get-ting arms from them for the workers.
It would mean insurrection and smashing the capitalist state, the armed and repressive machine that defends the bosses' property. Only then could the fight to establish socialism begin.
International Revolution. A revolutionary Australia, in which the power of the capitalists had been overthrown, would be surrounded by bitter enemies.
They would seek to impose an economic and military blockade, or wage war to re-introduce capitalism.
But Australia would also be surrounded by many millions of allies and potential allies: the working class and poor peasantry of the world, who are themselves forced to endure the horrors of capitalism.
A workers' revolution in Australia would be a beacon to the oppressed and exploited of the world.
To the masses of Asia and the Pacific a workers' government would address the most direct of appeals: "Take over the Australian companies and investments that have robbed you and exploited you for so long!
The full programme of Workers Power in the election (pdf file)
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The full programme of Workers Power in the election (pdf file)
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