Coalition has no mandate for a GST
John Howard claims that his government has "won the mandate from the Australian people" for a goods and services tax. He warned the Senate not interfere with this mandate by blocking or seeking to amend the GST.
Howard's argument is false.
Opinion polls since September 8 have consistently shown that the majority of Australians oppose a GST. The level of opposition has increased with each poll, the most recent showing 55% against the tax.
While the Coalition will form government on the basis of winning a majority of seats in the House of Representatives, it only won a minority of votes on October 3 — approximately 40% of all primary votes and 48-49% of the two-party preferred vote.
The single member electorate system for the House of Representatives means that the party which wins the most votes doesn't necessarily win the biggest number of seats. A party could win 20% of the lower house votes across Australia and still go unrepresented.
While it does not guarantee a completely accurate reflection in parliament of the level of support for different parties, the proportional representation method of selecting the Senate at least means that, within each state, parties are represented according to the proportion of votes they receive.
The Coalition parties did not win a majority of votes on October 3 and so do not have a popular mandate to implement a GST, or any other policy for that matter. The majority voted for parties that opposed the GST during the election campaign.
That fact means that progressive organisations and trade unions do have a mandate to oppose, by any means necessary, the Coalition government's attempt to implement a GST.
There are two options confronting us. One is to passively allow the Coalition to make this 10% cut in our standard of living, against the expressed will of the majority.
The other course is to campaign to stop the government in its tracks. This would involve trade unions, left parties and progressive organisations carrying out a systematic campaign of rallies, demonstrations, public discussions and nationwide strikes against the GST.
To succeed, such a campaign would have to aim to defeat the GST, not just amend it. And if Howard got away with implementing a GST, the campaign would need to focus on having it withdrawn.
Majority opposition to the tax provides the basis for a mass campaign. Government workers can refuse to carry out government policies, and private enterprise workers can refuse to produce profits for their employers, until the GST is withdrawn. Accompanied by mass public rallies, the demand of "No GST!" could no longer be ignored.
While such a campaign would have the potential to make Australia ungovernable by the Coalition, it would reflect, and seek to implement, the wishes of the majority of people.
There is a precedent for such action. In the 1970s, the trade union movement organised a national campaign of demonstrations and strikes to prevent the Fraser Liberal government from dismantling Medibank, the forerunner to Medicare.
We could expect no help from the Labor Party or the Australian Democrats in such a campaign. Labor leader Kim Beazley ruled out months ago the possibility of any future Labor government rescinding a GST introduced by the Coalition. Although Labor will vote against the GST in parliament, it accepts the fiction of Howard's "mandate" and is unlikely to organise a campaign of mass opposition which would discredit that fiction.
The Democrats have also made their general support for a GST clear, as well as their preparedness to negotiate with Howard to get (at least most of) his tax package through the Senate.
The choice confronts us all: endure a tax which none of us wants or resist it. If enough of us join in the resistance, we could prevent the massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich that the GST represents.