BY SUE BOLAND
The Democrats' leadership battle between current leader Senator Meg Lees and challenger Senator Natasha Stott Despoja was sparked by the party's poor results in the recent Western Australian and Queensland state elections where they were out-polled by the Greens.
Voters rejected the Democrats for helping the federal Coalition government bring in the unpopular goods and service tax (GST). Stott Despoja was quoted in the February 24 Sydney Morning Herald as saying that "Perhaps for the first time we are seen as part of the political establishment. Undoubtedly the GST is a key factor in this."
Australian Democrat Senator Andrew Murray discussed the Democrats leadership battle and the political choices confronting his party in the February 28 Sydney Morning Herald. He said: "There is a tremendous debate in the party about whether we are a major or a minor party... As soon as you get into a balance-of-power situation and are participating in the role of government, you immediately become part of the political establishment.
"Now there are those of us who believe that's our role, and that we should in fact grow the party so that it becomes significant enough to be part of the government. And there are those who wish for us to remain a protest movement."
In an interview with The Australian, published on March 1, Stott Despoja responded to Murray's comments, saying that she does not want to turn the Democrats into a "protest movement". "If I wanted to be part of a protest movement don't you think I could go find a placard and head to the latest rally?", she said.
The public perception of Stott Despoja as someone who would shift the Democrats to the left if she won leadership is largely a media creation. She just wants to position the Democrats a little more independently of the government so that they can pick up some of the more conservative Greens voters.
Stott Despoja
Despite the mass media describing Stott Despoja as an opponent of the GST, she voted for most aspects of the Coalition-Democrat GST deal, only abstained from voting on the tax's imposition on books and education.
Stott Despoja supported the Democrats' deal with the federal government on the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation bill. She and the rest of the Democrat senators supported the Coalition government's business tax package which cut the company tax rate to 30% and halved the capital gains tax. The Democrat senators, including Stott Despoja, voted to support the introduction of nursing home fees, and initially tried to amend rather than reject the Howard government's native title legislation.
When questioned about whether she would continue the Democrats' push to establish stronger links with corporations if she were elected as leader, Stott Despoja told the February 28 Australian Financial Review, "I was one of the first people to endorse that liaison with business".
While Stott Despoja wants to present the Democrats as being a little more independent of government, she doesn't disagree with the fundamental policy approach and method of taken by Meg Lees.
Under Lees' leadership, the Democrats cut loose the social movement protest vote and targeted the small "l" Liberal Party voters who had become disenchanted with Prime Minister John Howard's socially conservative government, but who still agreed with most of the government's economic policies. This meant that Lees was positioning the Democrats further to the right, as the "responsible" alternative party.
Meanwhile, Lees disputes media reports that the Democrats lost voters to the Greens in the recent WA and Queensland state elections because of its GST deal, claiming that the Democrats always do better in federal elections than they do in state elections.
But the fact that the Democrats weren't able to field as many candidates as the Greens in either election is a sign of their weakness.
Given that almost 30% of the WA electorate voted against the major parties, it could reasonably be expected the Democrats would have increased their vote, along with the Greens and other protest parties. They didn't because they proved themselves to be just as dishonest as the major parties when they did the GST deal with Howard.
The Democrats campaigned hard in the 1998 federal election on a platform of only supporting a GST if food was exempt. Once elected, the Democrats changed their position to only exempting raw food from the GST.
It wasn't just the Democrats' support for the GST which has aroused public resentment, but their dishonesty in promising to exempt food from the GST, when they had no intention of implementing that position.
The AFR outlined its owners' views on alternative parties, and the Democrats' leadership contest, in its February 28 edition: "This newspaper has normally supported a clear vote for a major party... That is still a desirable outcome but it is impractical to ignore the growing preference of Australian voters for independents and third parties."
"But", it added, "Australia needs some minor party leaders who are prepared to work with the party which a plurality of the population chooses to run the government. There will be policy differences and policies for which common ground just can't be found. But under Senator Lees, the Democrats have been prepared to face up to the challenge of finding common ground with the government of the day and not simply function as an obstructionist force."
It advised that "Democrat members ... shouldn't spurn Senator Lees just because she was prepared to negotiate seriously with the Government."
The AFR thus made it clear that from the point of view of the capitalist class, the Democrats long ago left behind their "protest" status.
The Greens
Now that the Greens have the balance of power with five seats in WA's upper house, will they follow the trajectory of the Democrats and participate as part of the political establishment, or, will they be the party of protest, that builds the extra-parliamentary people's movement against neo-liberal globalisation?
The challenge for the Greens is especially sharp now that, as Democrat Senator Aden Ridgeway pointed out in the March 3 Sydney Morning Herald,"The landscape has changed so much that there's a protest vote out there — those that support the Pauline Hanson camp and those that perhaps might support the S11 or the green camp..."
However, the record of the Greens when they have been in a position to exercise a balance of power vote has been similar to that of the Democrats.
In Tasmania, when the Greens exercised a balance of power vote after five Greens were elected to state parliament in 1989, they signed a formal Accord with the Premier Michael Field's Labor government. The accord specified that the Labor government would protect the forests in return for Greens support for the government's budget.
The outcome of the accord, which the Greens still describe as a success, was that Labor was able to paint itself with a green image while passing a horrendous budget which slashed jobs, cut back on public transport and attacked education. The Greens supported the budget. Three years later, the five Greens were re-elected but with a 5% drop in their vote.
When the Greens held the balance of power in the ACT Legislative Assembly in 1995, they voted to allow a minority Liberal government to take power, voted in favour of privatisation of the Jindalee nursing home, indicated that they weren't opposed in principle to corporatisation of ACT Electricity and Water, and only decided to oppose the Liberals' horror budget at the last minute.
It is true that Greens Senator Bob Brown has taken a progressive stance on most issues in the federal parliament. But then he is not in a position to exercise a balance of power vote in the Senate. And while he supports the on-the-streets protest movements, Brown and the Greens don't seek to build such campaigns themselves.
One exception was the campaign around mandatory sentencing in 2000. Brown's private members bill against mandatory sentencing was due to be debated in parliament when a young Aboriginal man in mandatory detention in the Northern Territory committed suicide.
There was a massive outpouring of public sentiment against mandatory sentencing with even Liberal parliamentarians opposed. However, the Greens' parliamentarist approach held them back from organising broad campaign committees which could mobilise public opinion to overturn the NT mandatory sentencing laws. Instead, only a few demonstrations were organised in a few cities. This campaign reflected the fact that the Greens do not really believe that mass public campaigns can effect political change.
There are worrying signs that increased voter support for the Greens will encourage them to follow the Democrats' trajectory of doing deals with the major parties in return for support for particular Green projects.
One indication of the Greens trajectory is the preference negotiations it conducted with the Liberal Party and the ALP for the March 17 by-election for the federal seat of Ryan in Queensland. The Greens hoped that they could extract a commitment from the major parties to improved environmental policies.
The ALP made a timely announcement that it would introduce national legislation to regulate land clearing to halt the loss of native vegetation by 2005. Even if the ALP is elected at the next election, it could have lost the following election before the 2005 deadline, making it easy to evade fulfilling this "promise". However, Brown welcomed the ALP's land clearing commitment and recommended to the Queensland Greens that preferences be directed to the ALP rather than the Liberals.
Some might say that there's no problem with this, that the Greens were successful in extracting a promise from the ALP. But all of the major parties, and the Democrats, are good at making promises like this only to renege on them once elected.
Without the existence of mass social protest movements, capitalist governments find it much easier to break their electoral promises. The Greens' focus on preference negotiations indicates that they share the Democrats' illusions in parliamentary deal-making as the most effective means to bring about progressive social change.