By Scott MacWilliam
PERTH — With a state election due by early next year, two prongs of the Lawrence Labor government's campaign strategy are becoming obvious. Both involve trying to recapture disillusioned constituencies.
One constituency is businessmen and women, some of whom were responsible for the large donations which have kept the party in power since 1983. The other is the skilled working class and salariat, who have suffered under the cuts to wages and state services of the last decade.
The opposition to the Old Swan Brewery redevelopment seems to put barriers in the way of both prongs of the ALP's electoral strategy.
Unless the project and a number of others go ahead, efforts to portray the ALP as "the party of business" will seem hollow.
On the other hand, if work begins on the office block, luxury residences or boutique hotel, then the government is shown as willing once again to do anything for the business mates whose previous wheeling and dealing continues to affect state taxes and charges.
The government's great fear is that voters will draw a direct line from the brewery project to the electoral choice between the ALP and the Liberal Party. For this reason, all opponents of the development must be marginalised by proclaiming them a danger to the ALP's re-election prospects.
Is there any substance to claims by government supporters that the anti-brewery movement is aiding the conservatives, either deliberately or unconsciously?
Unfortunately for the government, the opposition to the brewery project is gaining strength, especially in non-parliamentary forums and through a growing band of people willing to engage in direct action. The anti-redevelopment campaign has been the most prolonged and successful protest action in WA for at least a decade. After six years, and one previous concerted police action to remove protesters, work on the site will be carried out only through another substantial quasi-military operation.
The protest has struck a deep popular chord. Each opinion poll shows a large majority opposed to the project. This popular majority has remained solid over the nearly six years since the Burke government and its business allies first mooted a major redevelopment of the site.
The protest is directed first and foremost against the actions of governments, not against or for any particular party. Pro-Liberal ppear on rally platforms, and politicians generally have been given little prominence.
The marginalising of parties and politicians from the protest action has been deliberate. Recalling the expression "No matter who you vote for, the government always wins", the anti-development bloc has evolved a politics based upon a distrust of parties which aim to capture government.
This has been possible because of the composition of the bloc. The blacks, led by Robert Bropho, are not the professionals and careerists who can be co-opted easily into government schemes. They are urban "fringe-dwellers", members of a stratum continuously reproduced by the advance of capitalism, who are no closer to the Liberal Party than the ALP.
The fringe-dwellers' support of claims for sacred sites would sit no more comfortably with a Coalition government than it has with the ALP. Their courage and political commitment, in the face of racist vilification, harassment and arrest, comes from a lifetime of marginalisation.
The trade unionists who have campaigned against the redevelopment project are members of many unions, including all but one building union. They are by and large people who spent the 1970s battling the Court Coalition government, being arrested at Noonkanbah and other protests. In the next decade, they fought the Burke-Dowding-Lawrence governments and refused to be seduced by the ALP's entrepreneurial supporters.
When the majority of the TLC embraced the now-maligned WA Inc deals, the ex-CPA officials who joined the ALP to fulfil a lifetime's ambition of "being in government" labelled the minority union opposition "Trots", "ultraleftists" and "sectarians". Now, these ex-Stalinists hope to smother their opponents with Tory-blue badges!
The conservationists, Christians and others who have been a central part of the alliance also are no more closely allied to the Liberal than the Labor Party. Almost all have faced challenges from within their own circles because of their willingness to oppose the government.
In the particular case of doctors who have supported the anti-development alliance, these have been continuously forced to emphasise the non-partisan nature of their objections. The AMA, for instance, has been reluctant to become involved on the grounds that this could be construed as an anti-ALP position.
Consequently, Coalition politicians have been particularly ambivalent about the protest alliance's politics. In turn, the likelihood that the Liberal Party would honour the ALP's deal with Multiplex is widely recognised by protesters. The anti-redevelopment protest has little to do with the rather specious choice between Liberal and Labor parties, each of which seeks to represent the ruling class in government. Instead, during a period when the mass of the population has become cynical and distrustful of politics in any form, the protest has struggled to re-establish the importance of direct political action.