BY LESLIE RICHMOND
With South Australia's "non"-election campaign well underway, both Labor and the governing Liberals are scraping into each other's past records to convince voters to put them back into government next year.
The Liberals have once again tried to raise the rotting corpse of the State Bank's collapse under the previous Labor government. It's an issue they never tire of dragging out to try to scare the electorate and, more importantly, the "business community" (corporate journalese for the capitalist class).
Meanwhile, the Laborites are well under way with a program of deification of former premier Don Dunstan, using the legend of their past leader to promote their current leadership. So it often seems as if the election is taking place somewhere between the mid-1970s and 1992.
The only real indicators of the times are the now naked scramble by both major parties to cosy-up to corporate wealth, their shared nervousness about the rising popularity of the smaller parties and independents, and their increasingly shared policies.
The mainstream media's approach so far has been the predictable desire for spectacle over substance. An initial run of "will he or won't he" stories seemed aimed at pushing Liberal state Premier John Olsen to the polls before Prime Minister John Howard has to risk his own neck.
Following Olsen's apparent determination to call the election for March, voters have been treated to the old personality-war articles, where Olsen and Labor leader Mike Rann battle it out in the opinion polls to be the "preferred premier".
Stirred in with this is the standard sideline of rumours of a leadership challenge to Rann and speculation about who Olsen is going to axe from cabinet to boost the electoral appeal of his ministry. The only thing missing is any critical analysis of what will be the key issues in the coming election and the problems facing working people.
The issue which is likely to loom largest will be the fallout from the privatisation of the state's electricity distribution monopoly, the Electricity Trust of South Australia (ETSA). It is an issue which has dogged the Liberal Party throughout its most recent term in office, and an issue for which Labor has no answer.
Electricity crisis
In the run-up to the 1997 election, Olsen declared that his government would never sell ETSA. Four months later, in the best neo-liberal tradition, he set about laying the ground-work for ETSA to be generously dropped into private hands, limiting the ability of governments to influence electricity prices.
Four years later, and the promised glories of privatisation have once again failed to put in an appearance. Household bills have increased. Many businesses, since being moved to the National Electricity Market (NEM) earlier this year, have faced price increases of between 30-80%.
There have been allegations of mismanagement of the sale — a $30 million consultants fee, and possible underselling by up to $2 billion — and the independent industry regulator, Lew Owens, has warned that South Australia may face shortfalls in supply over what long-range weather forecasts are predicting could be a long, hot summer.
Olsen's spin on this is that the market has failed (through no fault of the government) to mature as it should have, and that much of SA's electricity problems are due increased economic growth.
The government insists there will not be any problems come summer, with the current supply arrangements adequate to meet any demand. However, their real concern is indicated by their actions. Environmental regulations have been changed, despite the Environmental Protection Authority questioning the move, to allow higher discharge levels for gas turbines operating outside of the metropolitan area.
Companies that were making noises about not being able to get proposed plants operational in time for summer, are now able to source cheap second-hand equipment at short notice — lowering their costs and their community responsibility, and easing the electoral pressure on the government. Text-book capitalism.
Business SA, an industry peak body which has been highly critical of the Olsen government's handling of the move to the NEM, has been given $100,000 to help businesses develop strategies to use electricity more efficiently. The general public, meanwhile, is simply urged to take individual responsibility and "do their bit" by switching off lights and electrical appliances.
Although households are not due to move to the NEM until January 2003, the government is keenly aware of the nervousness in the electorate about the potential price rises to be faced by more than 70,000 voters.
Attempting to disown responsibility and garner support without seriously upsetting the power corporations or making any real commitment, the government has let it be known that it may try to delay the entry of households to the NEM. Olsen has stated that he has "made a number of the key players aware" that he is considering approaching the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission over the matter, but that there "are a number of steps yet to go".
ALP non-alternative
The ALP's approach to making electoral gains from the electricity issue has been long on criticism, but short on solutions and silent on history. One aspect of the past that Labor hasn't raised is that it was its federal counterpart, under Prime Minister Paul Keating, that commissioned and championed the national competition policy report which formed the basis for the establishment of the NEM and the push for states to privatise their utilities.
Although Labor opposed the very unpopular privatisation deal in parliament, it did little to mobilise an angry population into real opposition that could have stopped the sell-off.
Despite its continued criticism of the government over the electricity issue, Labor has given no indication of how things would be different under an ALP government. There has been no commitment to cap prices, no policy to safeguard workers and low income earners from massive price rises, and not even a whisper of reversing the destructive trend of privatisation.
Labor's strongest criticism seems to be not that ETSA was privatised, but that the Liberals have mishandled the process.
South Australian Socialist Alliance Senate candidate John McGill says Labor's lack of policy reflects its basic support for the same neo-liberal ideology that the Liberals are enraptured by. "Labor and the Liberals are not providing solutions to working people because they're falling over each other trying to provide solutions to the big end of town".
Nationally, the results of recent elections have shown that, while there has been a swing away from the Liberals, Labor is struggling to pick up that swing as first preference votes. It is a pattern that is being replicated in local pre-election polls.
McGill believes that many voters are turning to smaller parties and independents not as a protest, but as a conscious rejection of the politics and policies of the major parties. He says that people know that Labor offers no real alternative to the Liberals.
In South Australia, the similarity between the two major parties is definitely more telling than their differences, especially their mutual desire to cultivate close relations with business leaders. Both Rann and Olsen have chosen dinners, lunches, and breakfasts with business representatives as appropriate forums to make major policy announcements. Both have made statements about the need for governments to provide incentives — corporate welfare packages — to businesses to operate in SA. Both have been working hard to convince the corporate sector that it will be business as usual after the elections, regardless of which of the two is elected.
This is all as would be expected of the conservative Liberals, but Rann has taken the Labor Party (which still occasionally claims to have some sort of socialist credentials) to new levels in this game. A recent two-page profile piece in the Advertiser's weekend supplement, aside from highlighting his role as Dunstan's press secretary, made several mentions of meetings and lunches with the captains of industry and finance and talked of his attempts to sell Labor as a viable capitalist economic manager.
This piece followed an address at another business dinner, where Rann pledged that Labor would not increase taxes to fund its election promises, and committed a future Labor government to limiting its total expenditure to the levels set down by the Liberal government in its last budget.
Socialist Alliance
McGill believes that in this climate the Socialist Alliance is a vital project, providing people with a real alternative that is totally committed to ending the corporate domination of society. He says that the real difference between Labor and the Socialist Alliance is that the alliance aims to make changes through building movements and involving people in campaigns, and to use the elections to build those campaigns.
"We want to change society from the ground up, not from the top down", he says. "We can't rely on the system to make real changes, because the system doesn't work. If it was working, then we wouldn't have the problems we have. How can we have so many people suffering from unemployment, poverty, and a lack of access to decent health-care and education if the political system we've got is working in the interests of people? It's the system that's allowed this to happen."
In the coming state elections, the Socialist Alliance intends campaigning against privatisation and the nuclear industry, and to build the movement for refugee rights. "The Socialist Alliance in South Australia will be coordinating the development of our national policy on the nuclear industry", said McGill. "We'll be contesting the elections to provide a real alternative, but we'll still be here after the elections. Unlike Labor or the Liberals, we'll be doing what we promised — building movements that can force real change. And that will come from the street, not from the parliament."