Satirical news outlet The Chaser led its election night coverage with the header: “Labor secures bigger majority, excited to do nothing with it”.
Their clairvoyancy is to be admired, because nothing the prime minister has said since being reelected with a bigger majority of seats disproves their point.
Anthony Albanese has been busy lowering people’s expectations with his self-serving “I don’t pretend to be a revolutionary; I’m a reformist” quip.
Labor won the small target election strategy contest against the Coalition. Its campaign focused on already announced reforms to the public health system, Medicare, investment in childcare, free vocational training and a 20% cut to all university student debt. It had an additional $1.52 billion for seat-by-seat bribes.
Labor avoided speaking about international issues, especially Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine. It avoided talking up the unpopular AUKUS military pact with Donald Trump and its “climate policy” that caves in to the fossil fuel corporations.
While mainstream pundits are talking up Labor’s chances of staying in power for another term, they discount the growing alienation from the major parties and the swinging voter trend.
Albanese likes to position Labor as “kind” compared with the Coalition. He said on election night that Labor “treats people with respect”.
He’s speaking to those disaffected layers, particularly youth, who are increasingly skeptical that any party will deliver real reforms. At the end of three years, if Labor hasn’t addressed the housing and cost-of-living crises, they will vote for someone else.
Albanese’s message is that Labor will be a steady hand at managing capital for the ruling class; Labor has a “kinder” way of shoring up the profits-first system than Peter Dutton’s Trumpian approach.
Labor looks like it will win 94 out of 150 seats in the House of Representatives. Does it have a mandate to avoid leading on raising welfare payments, capping rents, taxing corporations, scrapping the undemocratic union laws and speeding up real action to stop catastrophic climate change?
Combined, Labor and the Coalition won 90% of the seats, but their vote share continues to decline — 66.5% of the lower house vote as at May 16 — showing growing disillusion.
Far-right parties received a combined vote of 11.83% in the lower house and 13.28% in the Senate. The combined Greens and socialist vote was 12.37% in the lower house and 12.22% in the Senate.
Socialist Alliance ran a modest campaign in lower and upper house seats in four states and recorded its highest ever vote (since it formed in 2001). We also received a +5.20% swing in the tightly contested seat of Wills, where the Greens campaign nearly ousted Peter Khalil in the context of great anger against Labor’s refusal to stand up for Palestine against Israel’s genocide. The Wills campaign, among others, point to the need for the left to build movements for real change outside parliament.
If the union and social/ecological movements don’t take up the challenge to force Labor to act, even on its mediocre program, we are likely to see a lot more window dressing.
This applies to its climate change laws and nature repair bills, its housing and future fund laws and its full funding of public schools bill. Appointing Murray Watt to the environment portfolio portends of new fix-its, but for the fossil fuel industry rather than First Nations people or the environment.
While the Greens did a good job in the last parliament of exposing Labor’s inadequate bills, that is not a strategy for change. Apart from this and blocking bills, they lacked a strategy to win more concessions from the government. It underscores the fact that just getting more MPs does not necessarily change politics or change the status quo.
Sustained mass movements that do not get waylaid on piecemeal crumbs are going to be decisive to secure progressive change.
When Coalition PM Tony Abbott delivered a horror budget in 2015, spontaneous national “Block the Budget” protests involving tens of thousands of people in capitals and regional cities stopped parliament passing most of Abbott’s cuts.
During the Kevin Rudd-Julia Gillard Labor government, a strong climate movement mobilised against the inadequate carbon pollution reduction scheme.
The pro-Palestine campaign was the only mass movement of significance under Labor’s last term. Despite the mainstream commentary, its electoral expression dented Labor’s vote in several working-class seats. The movement’s weekly protests for 16 months was critical to this.
But years of neoliberalism, which has led to the atomisation of the working class and a shrinking, bureaucratised union movement, holds all progressive movements back. There are no easy or quick fixes, except for those seeking real change to regroup and strategise.
Sustained mass movements not only help expose complicit governments, they involve people in concrete activities which then enlarge their horizons about who their allies are and what needs to change.
Socialist Alliance believes that to win a truly democratic, peaceful, just and ecologically sustainable future, working people must take ownership and control of our resources out of the hands of the capitalist minority and transfer it to society as a whole. This can only be achieved through a qualitative expansion in direct democracy and democratic planning at all levels.
We are committed to doing the best we can to educate, organise and mobilise working people and other oppressed groups to replace the power of the capitalists with popular power.
If you agree then join us.
[Sue Bolton is member of the Socialist Alliance National Executive and a fourth-term Merri-bek councillor in Victoria.]