By Lisa Renfrey
SYDNEY — "After four years of Coalition government, NSW is a more unjust and degraded society. The Fahey-Greiner government has consolidated the anti-people, anti-environment project begun in the 1970s and 80s by the state Labor government under Wran and Unsworth."
With these words, the Democratic Socialists launched their NSW election campaigns in Newcastle, Wollongong and Sydney over the last two weeks. The Democratic Socialists are standing candidates in the lower house seats of Wollongong, Newcastle, Marrickville and Fairfield, as well as a ticket in the upper house.
Unlike all other parties in this race, the Democratic Socialists are not in it simply to win. Their ideas, aims and methods of campaigning are therefore quite different — more radical and more thought provoking.
The central issues of their campaign are the major parties' drive for austerity and greater social control in NSW and federally: unemployment; the decline in living standards and social services; the privatisation of public resources; wage cuts and enterprise bargaining; the destruction of our environment; attacks on women's rights and discrimination against lesbians and gay men; Aboriginal deaths in custody; and the anti-civil rights "law and order" agenda.
The issues are linked in the socialists' call for a green, left alternative.
"The simple truth is", they say in their campaign statement, "that both Labor and Liberal have consistently represented the interests of big business profits".
Most recently in NSW, for example, "when developers like Sid Londish, the tourism corporations and Kerry Packer sing, monstrosities like the Third Runway get built ... a development which was opposed by 87% of residents before it was built and which is now making the lives of residents in Sydney's inner west a misery and a health hazard. What is community opinion compared to that of the millionaires?"
Undemocratic society
According to the Democratic Socialists, such crimes against ordinary people can be committed only because this is a "deeply undemocratic society". The lack of democracy, they argue, extends across and into all institutions, but is particularly evident in parliament and the dominant political parties.
The socialists point out, for instance, that politicians elected to parliaments are, except at election time, neither accountable nor recallable if they fail to represent the interests of the majority.
"They are not even accountable to the rank and file members of their own parties", commented Bruce Threlfo, former ALP member and now upper house candidate for the Democratic Socialists.
"How many times has the parliamentary caucus of the ALP ridden roughshod over party policy, such as it did on the question of uranium mining in the mid-'80s? The Liberal Party is worse, not even allowing policy making conferences of the party membership. And the Australian Democrats, while they have some good policy positions, hold to the undemocratic practice of allowing their members of parliament an individual conscience vote on fundamental questions of human rights such as women's right to choose abortion."
Real democracy, argue the socialists, means more than voting in the occasional election. "It means putting real decision-making power into the hands of ordinary people so that the majority really does decide."
Their fight for real democracy, for "a new type of politics" means that the Democratic Socialists have a different approach to electoral politics, upper house candidate Robynne Murphy told GLW.
"Being able to express your opinions via a ballot paper once every few years is not democracy", Murphy said. "Even the limited choice of candidates available in most elections — limited by our current electoral laws, which mean that people have to have considerable resources before they can stand — distorts and cripples the so-called democratic process that parliamentary elections are supposed to represent. You end up being forced to vote for a lesser evil all the time. You're not able to express what you really think or need by voting."
While the Democratic Socialists point to the massive limitations of parliamentary politics as an avenue for real progressive change, they do want to run a serious campaign in these elections. "We think it is important that people going to the polls are at least able to express their anger and opposition to the conservative and corrupt politics of the major parties by voting for alternative parties."
Role of ALP
In the framework of either an ALP or Liberal victory in the NSW elections, the Democratic Socialists call for a Labor government. Wollongong candidate Chris Pickering told GLW, "Because parliamentary politics has been dominated for so long by these two parties, most people still believe that they have no alternative but to vote for one or the other. And because the Labor Party has marketed itself as the party of the working people, there are still some illusions in the ALP.
"The real nature of Labor, including the Labor left, is most clearly exposed when they take government and implement (often more cleverly) the right-wing policies also advocated by the Liberals. Experience of the federal ALP, for example, has resulted in far fewer illusions in Labor."
Explaining their decision to stand against Green party and other alternative candidates in the state elections, the Democratic Socialists point to the need for a radically different type of politics if social justice and environmental sustainability are to be achieved.
"The majority in this society — workers, family farmers, pensioners, students and unemployed — can only win their rights through grassroots action and organisation", they say. Ahead of elections in importance they put such activities as "rallies demanding jobs for all; strikes for decent wages and working conditions; demonstrations against cutbacks in social services and marches to save the environment and women's rights".
The building of broad mass movements which are independent of political parties and which involve growing numbers of people in active public campaigning is what the Democratic Socialists are about. "It's what makes us different from the rest of the 'alternative parties' who, while they sometimes have good policies on paper, think seats in parliament are the be-all and end-all of political life", says the campaign statement.
In contrast to the election focus of the NSW Greens, the Democratic Socialists argue that getting a few progressive people elected to parliament, even with the balance of power, is not a solution to fundamental problems since the major decisions affecting most Australians are not made in parliament, but in the boardrooms of the major corporations and by high level government bureaucrats.
"Where the Greens and most other alternative candidates go wrong is in believing that a narrowly parliamentary perspective can be the basis for achieving real democracy. It can't, not in the movements or in society as a whole", said Pickering.
"We want to and do work with alternative parliamentarist parties during election campaigns, but we also believe that we need to continue campaigning very actively long after the elections are over. Politics is an every day business for the exploiters, and it has to be for us as well. Our aim is to unite grassroots campaigns into a powerful movement for change which keeps the pressure on, organises and struggles in all areas of political life, all year round, not just around elections."
The Democratic Socialists call for the creation of "a new party of working people" which will help to unite grassroots campaigns. Such a party, based on a new type of politics emphasising participatory democracy, activism and mass campaigns, can open the way to a new type of government, one which puts the interests of the majority of people first and in which election campaigning will be a quite different process.