Socialist Alliance will help 'win victory'

BY TIM STEWART

BRISBANE — “Twenty-nine years ago, the Labor Party came to Musgrave
Park and promised to do something for Aboriginal people, 29 years later
and nothing's changed”, indigenous activist Sam Watson told the 135 people
who packed out the Queensland Council of Unions auditorium for the May
15 launch of the Socialist Alliance, which seeks to be “the alternative
Labor is not”.

Watson told his audience of the history of Brisbane and of indigenous
struggle, of the Gurindji land struggle in the Northern Territory in 1965,
of Joh Bjelke-Petersen's state of emergency in 1971 during the visit to
Queensland of the South African Springboks, when his police smashed anti-apartheid
protests, and of the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in 1972.

Watson related both his pride in often being a part of this history,
and also in being a part of the Socialist Alliance launch.

“I'm going to join the Socialist Alliance”, Watson said, “I'm going
to be a proud member of it.”

The was meeting chaired by Jo Ball, an activist in Students Campaigning
Against Multinationals and a member of Socialist Alternative, one of the
alliance's component parties. Speakers at the meeting reflected the full
range of activists who are backing the new grouping of socialist parties,
and included a welcome from the indigenous Turrbal people, land claimants
to the Brisbane area.

The formation of the Socialist Alliance is a radical step for the socialist
left, but it's not just that, the Democratic Socialist Party's Karen Fletcher
told the meeting. “It's [also] a necessary campaigning vehicle in the fight
against the big business agenda.”

Lana Nadj from the International Socialist Organisation added that running
Socialist Alliance candidates in the coming federal elections is “a specific
campaign that links the multi-issue campaigns against corporate tyranny”.

“We want to see the Socialist Alliance as a process of building unity,
strength and ultimately winning victory for the anti-capitalist movement”,
she said.

Sacked union delegate Elliot Moreland spoke of the military-like precision
with which employers like Caltex attack and isolate active workplace unionists
like himself. Citing the 1998 maritime struggle, he attributed the problems
of the trade union movement directly to the ALP.

“Labor will not change. Labor is committed to running the system quietly.
It hasn't even promised to scrap half the anti-worker laws the Liberals
introduced”, he remarked angrily.

“On the other hand, I believe that the Socialist Alliance is committed
to fighting for workers rights”, said Moreland. “It is about campaigning
for full union rights, and it's about fighting the Liberals.”

Messages of support were sent by Howard Guille, the state secretary
of National Tertiary Education Union, and by Hughie Williams, the state
secretary of the Transport Workers Union.

<http://www.socialist-alliance.org>.

From GLW issue 450