Keating's cynical ploy
A desperate, irresponsible idea that has been floating in the political stratosphere for many months was finally brought to ground last week when Paul Keating blustered in parliament that Labor would not block the GST in the Senate should it lose the next election to the Liberals.
The move was a cynical ploy on at least three grounds. First, it had the short-term aim of simply diverting public attention from Labor's role in fostering the financial debacle that has hurt many ordinary Victorians very badly. The news that federal treasurer John Dawkins turned a blind eye to exorbitant borrowing by the Victorian Labor government in a desperate bid to save its own neck again highlighted how abject has been Labor's bowing before big-money interests.
Second, abandoning any sense at all of adherence to principle, the ploy is designed simply to get Labor re-elected without any guarantee about, or even perspective on, what that might mean in terms of defending working conditions and living standards in the future. In Dirty Harry fashion, Labor has put a gun to the head of the Australian electorate, saying: "Make my day — vote Liberal".
Third, Labor is as conscious as the rest of us of the fact that once it allowed a Liberal government to introduce a GST in some form, it would remain a permanent feature of the Australian taxation system. No matter which party then won government subsequently, the tax would prevail. The point is not that Keating secretly supports the GST, a tax he once himself proposed, but that it sits well enough with all the other aspects of Labor's long-term program anyway.
While it may appear to some to be a clever manoeuvre, opening an electoral gap between Labor and the Coalition on an issue that is patently unpopular and unacceptable, the effect is to narrow the differences between the major parties even further by proposing a continuum of Labor-Liberal governments further down the path of anti-worker economic restructuring.
Not only would Labor be willing to pick up the Liberals' GST down the track. It should be as clear as day that it would also pick up the contract labour system it now purports to oppose.
Of course, the point was not just to raise the electoral stakes against the Coalition, but to catch the Democrats in the cross-fire by eliminating any thought in the public mind that Democrat senators would have the opportunity to block GST legislation.
Anticipating the move, Democrat leader John Coulter last July labelled the idea that Labor might not block the GST "an act of incredible brutality and cynicism". Now that it has happened, the electoral options have indeed narrowed for the large progressive-environmental electorate outside the control of the major parties, but not necessarily in the way that Labor aims to achieve.
Keating's cynical ploy actually further depreciates the value of voting Labor — in the fragile hope that life will be just slightly more bearable than under the Coalition — as much as it undermines support for the Democrats. And it makes even clearer the point that no matter who wins the next election, there is much more to gain from building a coalition of progressive forces that could make a creditable standing in the next electoral round and then be the locus of an effective, broadly based, extraparliamentary opposition to the incoming government.