The federal Coalition government is clearly using the hysteria around the deportation of Willie Brigitte for alleged "terrorist" activities and the arrival of a small boatload of asylum seekers at Melville Island to prepare the most favourable terms for a federal election. It is counting on fear and racism to win the election for the Coalition, as they did last time.
Exploiting the widespread belief in the Australian working class that, when the chips are down, workers have more in common with the capitalist ruling class than with those yellow/brown/black hordes to the north/out there has been a political staple of both Coalition and Labor politicians for more than a century, especially in times or war and economic uncertainty.
Over the last three decades, openly racist attitudes have been rolled back quite a bit by the progressive social movements and by the desire of Australian big business to cultivate an image of Australia as a racially harmonious, "multicultural" society — in order to increase its profits from trade and tourism with east and south-east Asia. But covert xenophobic racism it is still a major factor, having real material roots in the privilege of most Australian workers relative to workers on a global scale.
This relative privilege promotes a false sense of superiority, albeit one that is challenged. And exploiting this is at the heart of Prime Minister John Howard's re-election strategy.
"How dare you call me a racist?", he exclaims, with that injured look as more brown-skinned asylum seekers are cast off out to sea or locked-up in on offshore detention centre. "How dare you say I say I lied?", even as yet another lie is baldly served up.
Howard perfected this posture when he defended Pauline Hanson's anti-Asian racist bigotry in 1997 with "anti-political correctness" as his excuse. Earlier attempts by Howard to play the racist card in the 1980s by supporting racist historian Geoff Blainey in the anti-Asian immigration campaign were less successful. But he came back to it with Hanson.
She was convenient for Howard because she played the racist card openly and crudely, and yet received 1 million first preference votes. Howard simply nudged her aside (as British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did to the neo-Nazi National Front), played the racist card more effectively and implemented key Hansonite policies.
The Labor Party leaders crumbled in the face of this manoeuvre because they too sought to win back votes from Hanson's One Nation in an unprincipled way.
So if Howard manages to stage the next elections in the framework of "border protection" and "combating terrorism", the ALP will have two choices. Simon Crean can try to "stand shoulder-to-shoulder" with the Howard government on these issues while mumbling "but the real issues are Medicare and education" (a tactic which failed then Labor leader Kim Beazley utterly in the last federal election) or go the opposite way and really oppose Howard's reactionary and racist policies.
However, the second course would require a massive policy backflip by the ALP and a massive infusion of political/moral principle and spine that are hard to imagine.
The ALP's vote for the outlawing of financial support to and membership of the military wing of Hamas (with a potential a 25-year jail sentence for violators of the ban) confirm Labor's chronic bi-partisan hypocrisy on the issue of political violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Both the Coalition and Labor support and legitimise the daily, systematic political violence of the Israeli war machine against the Palestinian people while they are quick to brand the violence of Palestinians resisting this state terror as "terrorism".
Labor's record clearly indicates that any real opposition to Howard's racist politics in the next election will only come from the Greens, left parties like the Socialist Alliance and from the opposition on the street.
From Green Left Weekly, November 12, 2003.
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