Alison Dellit
The Socialist Alliance is likely to receive more than 12,000 votes across the 26 lower house seats it stood in, with slightly less votes in the Senate. It was the first time the alliance contested a federal election campaign with its name on the ballot paper.
With around three-quarters of the ballot counted on October 10, the Socialist Alliance had received 11,723 votes for the lower house, and 10,263 votes in the upper house.
According to Lisa Macdonald, a national coordinator of the alliance and its candidate for Reid, these voters and the large number of progressive people who voted for the Greens, mean that the alliance is better prepared to fight the inevitable attacks of the incoming Coalition government. She said that the Socialist Alliance will be "aiming to connect as many as possible of these thousands of left voters into grassroots campaigns against unjust wars, detention of refugees and privatisation, and in defence of union and democratic rights".
The Socialist Alliance's average vote declined slightly on the party's 2001 vote, to around three-quarters of a percent. The results varied significantly between seats, with the highest votes in the ACT seat of Fraser (2%) and Perth (1.33%) where the alliance was on top of the ballot. The Fraser candidate, James Vassilopoulos, also scored the alliance's highest vote in the 2001 federal election.
In the inner Sydney seat of Grayndler, the Socialist Alliance's Sue Johnson won 1.3% of the vote, a marginal increase on the previous federal election result. David Glanz, running in the Wills electorate in Melbourne, won 1.21% of the vote, and in Sydney's western suburbs, Macdonald scored 1.08%.
In the Senate, the alliance's vote increased slightly overall. The raw figure, however, obscures a very different voting pattern. Whereas in the 2001 election, nearly two-thirds of the alliance's Senate vote came from Brisbane, where the alliance was on the top of the ballot, in 2004, the vote was more evenly distributed. In NSW, for example, the alliance's Senate vote has tripled, with 25% of the vote not yet counted. In Victoria, it is also likely to be triple that of the previous election.
Other left-wing parties also recorded modest lower-house results. In Newcastle, one of the few seats where the alliance's vote increased, the Progressive Labour Party's vote halved from the last election, to 2.49%. The Socialist Equality Party averaged less than 0.4% of a vote in the three seats in which it stood. In Batman, the Indigenous-rights party Your Voice's candidate won 0.86% of the vote.
In the Senate nationally, the PLP scored 13,823 votes and the HEMP party won 32,926 votes. In Victoria, Your Voice won 5463 votes, while in NSW the Save the ADI Site won 2559 votes, the Nuclear Disarmament Party 1617 votes and the Socialist Equality Party 269.
The far-right Citizens Electoral Council, which ran the largest election campaign it has in years, was soundly beaten by the Socialist Alliance in all but two seats that both parties contested.
Macdonald said that the alliance's campaigning will increase, rather than decrease, now that the election is over. "With Howard on the offensive again — and the severe limitations of voting as a tool for social change being clear to all — I think we will see a greater preparedness of progressive-minded people to take extra-parliamentary action. And the Socialist Alliance will, as always, be there on the streets, in the workplaces and on campuses helping to organise people into a far more real and powerful opposition than exists in parliament at the moment."
From Green Left Weekly, October 13, 2004.
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