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Workers Power Global, Melbourne
As Australia wakes up to the fact that it is in for another three years of the Coalition and the further attacks on the working class this will bring, Socialist Alliance activists are taking stock of SAâs performance in its first federal election.
This was a race election, Howard and Beasley competed for who could be "whiter than white", as the New York Times put it, and Howard won. The Financial Review refers to this as the "One Nationisation of Australian politics".
The Socialist Alliance stood as a clear pro-refugee, anti-war party. It had existed for less than nine months and had not succeeded in registering itself before the election was called. This meant that the name Socialist Alliance did not appear on the ballot papers and the SA had to rely on name recognition of its candidates and the hard work of activists on polling day handing out "how to vote" cards. It is in this context that the SA polled a national average of around 1% of the vote.
In Victoria, candidates reached as much as 1.4% - around a thousand votes out of the possible 90,000 in each electorate. And thatâs one thousand people consciously voting for the SA.
High profile candidates, like aboriginal activist Sam Watson, scored many thousands of votes.
And this needs to be put into the perspective of the massive increase in the vote for the Greens. The Green Party has been around since the late 1980s. It has had a very high profile and a media conscious Senator for the last two elections and it has a professional party machine. That said, it was only running at just over 2% in the last election and managed to double its national average in this one.
In many places where the Greens and Socialist Alliance were running alongside each other, the votes in some booths were not significantly different.
What is clear is that, at least in safe Labor seats, the Greens picked up votes directly from disaffected ALP voters. And this seems likely given the bi-partisan stance the ALP took on both War and the issue of refugees - tailing the racist scare mongering of the Liberals almost right down the line.
The Greens, on the other hand, managed to appear as the party with a humane stance on refugees and a less rabid position on the war. Many people saw them as the anti-war party - though in reality their position is for a UN led conflict rather than a US one.
Bob Brown is trying to downplay the extent to which this was a Labor protest vote as much as a positive vote for the stand taken by the Greens on several key issues- they "out-labored Labor" as one Greens spokesperson put it. Brown has said that he will block any reactionary policies on the war or refugees and will not support any more reforms to the Industrial Relations laws.
Bob Brown's performance is very similar to that of the Labor Party (and particularly the Labor left) of the early eighties when they were still in opposition - talking tough and openly defying seemingly popular trends (e.g. Franklin Dam, land rights and Aboriginal self-determination).
The Greens really did "out-labor" Labor and will likely want to continue to pose themselves as the reformist alternative. Socialist Alliance will be in direct competition with the Greens for non-Labor, pro-refugee and anti-war members.
The Socialist Alliance, on the other hand, was the only genuinely anti-war party running and the only one with a policy for opening the borders to all refugees. The vote for the Alliance was a vote for these policies.
On a wider front, the vote for the openly racist One Nation collapsed - returning to the Liberals - as party founder Pauline Hanson explained before the election - the Coalition had already taken most of their policies anyway. All the same, the tendency to overstate their loss should be qualified.
First, the Liberals captured One Nation votes by taking on their policies and this means that the racist vote is still high and has consolidated. Secondly, One Nation did not perform as well as at the last election but still 400,000 people voted for them and their percentages were still high in some Queensland seats.
This turn to the right in mainstream politics has, however, brought a strong reaction. High profile Liberals - including ex-leader John Hewson have spoken out against their own partyâs policies. Some important figures from the Labor Party have also recognised that tailing the Coalition on war and refugees lost the party the election.
And the results are not all bad news. The national aggregate vote for minor parties was slightly down but still significant at just under 9%. Pollsters expected that, in these times of uncertainty, people would move in droves either to Liberal or Labor and that the minor party vote would drop, but this is clearly not the case.
What the ALP will do next is also up for grabs. Crean was the poster boy of the Hawke/Keating era, and was handpicked to succeed them at some stage. He is a member of the Right faction and has that Hawke consensus style of leadership (read crunching all the factions into line). His imminent and unopposed takeover of the leadership next week confirms that Labor will consolidate in a rightward direction - the "Blairisation" of Federal Labor begins.
He has already signaled his intention to curb the influence that the unions have on the Party. This is a message to both the bosses and to key unions like the AMWU who have criticised Labor's tailing of the refugee and war issues. But it is also aimed at those on the left of the party who may have illusions that the "policy review" could pull the party leftward. It remains to be seen whether the leftward split from Labor was just a protest vote, which will now rush back to Labor, or a more permanent trend.
Socialist Alliance will be in clear competition with the Greens for disaffected Labor voters. But, in this current climate of crisis for the ALP - with Kim Beasley having somewhat graciously fallen on his sword - and a general turn right for the Coalition, where does the Socialist Alliance find itself?
Clearly, the handing of preferences to the Greens, as happened across the Socialist Alliance, was a mistake. The problem for the Alliance was not being able to distinguish itself sufficiently from the Greens in the later days of the election race.
There was little criticism of the Greensâ policies - instead, every effort was made to put out joint statements. This meant that the distinction between the parties was not clear to those voters who did want to make an anti-war or pro-refugee statement.
The fact is that the Greens listed the war fourteenth on their election leaflet and then only to say a UN solution was necessary. Hardly the politics of an anti-war party. Socialist Alliance should never have preferenced a Party with no real connection to the working class.
Of course, working class people did vote for it - as a protest, as the Party that was in the media with the more humane stance on war and refugees that would normally have been Laborâs stance. But this does not make them an alternative to Labor.
In fact, Socialist Alliance gave away one of the best chances to demonstrate to people why Parliamentary politics of any sort is a dead end for the working class. In the past, revolutionaries have called for a vote for Labor so that the party could be put to the test of power, where its working class supporters would be able to demand policies to protect and further their interests. Experience of many years has shown that, faced with this test, the ALP has always been found wanting.
Because they have no base in the organizations of the working class, we couldnât put those sorts of demands and that sort of pressure on the Greens, even if they did get into power in Australia. Green Parties in power internationally have shown this clearly.
We only need to look at the highly successful German Greens to see a party which has been complicit in the bombing of Serbia, whose leadership has strongly supported the war against Afghanistan and which has even abandoned its own environmental policies on nuclear power, waste and weapons.
That said, the Greens are seeking to work closely with the Socialist Alliance in the future.
This is something that the Party needs to treat very carefully. We donât want to set about building some new reformist party and we donât want to be caught in the middle of some unholy stitch-up of the "left" parties.
Although people may have voted for the Greens in protest at the ALPâs bi-partisan attitude to war and racism, the Greens are no alternative for the working class and do not even have the ALPâs dwindling support in the organized working class.
The Socialist Alliance should not follow the position of the Democratic Socialist Party (one of its largest constituent members) in berating unions like the CFMEU for donating money to the ALP. Sure, it would have been nicer if that money had come straight to the Socialist Alliance, but the DSP would have done better to berate the unions for not using their strength to argue openly against the war and to put public pressure on the ALP, which still relies so heavily on them, to change its policies.
This was a race election with an emphasis on security and protecting "our" way of life in uncertain times. In the short term, at least, the political current is running in a rightward direction. Any pull to the right, whether by watering down/softening its politics or moulding itself in the manner of the Greens, must be resisted by the Socialist Alliance and it must continue to remain unequivocally anti-war and anti-racist.
In the months and years ahead, we are likely to see the disaffected rush back to the fold of the ALP - as the realities of a third term Coalition government start to bite home.
We support the Socialist Alliance so long as it has the potential to provide a revolutionary alternative for workers and this will only occur if it clearly sets itself apart for the Greens. It must take a lead in campaigns on the ground and put itself at the head of a working class fightback against the coming attacks and strengthen its platform by adopting a revolutionary programme.
The full programme of Workers Power in the election (pdf file)
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