Economy and environment
A not uncommon comment during this campaign has been that "the election has been fought on the economy, not the environment".
In reality, it has been fought on neither the environment nor the economy. The ALP and the Coalition have avoided discussion of their environmental policies as much as possible because they don't want to remind us of what they are. Less able to avoid the issues of unemployment and declining living standards, however, they attempt to disguise their real economic policies and play the combined game of vote buying and scare mongering. They avoid the real economic problems, namely, how to eliminate unemployment, how to ensure that the wealth produced is shared and how to ensure that it is produced in an environmentally sustainable fashion.
The list of what the ALP and the Coalition share on the environment is fairly long: continuation and/or expansion of uranium mining; promotion of unsustainable logging and woodchipping; fast-tracking approval of environmentally sensitive projects; a head in the sand approach on forcing industry to reduce the use of CFCs; ignoring the need for massive increases in research and development of alternative energy.
They share these anti-environmental policies for the same reason that they share their approach to restructuring the economy. Both want to help business, especially big business, solve its problems — at the expense of the rest of us. So we get the "choice" of the Coalition's replacement of several taxes on business by a GST plus even lower wages flowing from weaker unions, or Labor's big reductions on taxes on business profits, and the steady erosion of real wages through award restructuring.
Since "reducing the cost of investment" is the Liberal-Labor battle cry, neither party is going to incline towards enforcing strict environmental standards on development projects, making business pay to clean up the pollution it creates or taxing business more to pay for research or for cleaner systems of public transport, for example.
This is where green and left policies, environmental and real economic reform, come together. Defending and improving living standards and quality of life and defending and repairing the environment are both activities that require a shift of wealth and power away from the big corporations which control it now to the people themselves.
The ALP and the Coalition don't have this agenda. It must become the agenda of the green and left parties and organisations. It is a big task; it can only be done by working together: movements and parties, environmentalists and socialists, parliamentarians and activist organisations. The old wisdom that says unity is strength still applies, especially when we know that the fight for the environment and a decent life will be met with every kind of resistance.