By Peter Boyle
SYDNEY — You wouldn't know it from the establishment media's coverage of the result of the March 27 NSW state election, but its greatest significance was the rebuff of the ruling class's privatisation drive by a whopping 56% of voters. This rejection was despite Liberal leader Kerry Chikarovski's attempt to bribe households with $1100 of free shares from the proceeds of promised electricity privatisation.
There was a 6% swing to Labor on a two-party preferred basis, but a record 24.1% gave their primary vote to Legislative Assembly (lower house) candidates not from Labor or the Coalition. The rebellion against the traditional ruling parties was greatest in rural NSW. However, because of the undemocratic electoral system only six non-major party candidates will take lower house seats.
Hardly anyone outside the Liberal-National Coalition openly supported electricity privatisation — the main agenda in these elections as far as big business was concerned — and many Coalition candidates voiced their unease at the Coalition's line. The great majority of small parties, even right-wing ones, opposed the privatisation.
Now the Nationals' leader George Souris says privatisation is off his party's agenda and there is even talk of a split in the Coalition.
The anti-privatisation ground swell became clear before election day but the business papers and columnists consoled their readers with articles about the supposed inevitability of privatisation and the fervent support for privatisation of Bob Carr and other Labor leaders. The latter is true, but the new Carr government will incur public wrath if it tries to force through electricity privatisation after being elected on the first significant wave of anti-privatisation sentiment in the last 15 years.
The ruling class knows it faces serious problems selling the next steps in its neo-liberal austerity and privatisation offensive. Although the Coalition won the last federal election, it failed even then to muster a majority vote for its goods and service tax and it cannot generate much public sympathy against the Senate's questioning of Howard's claim to have a mandate for the tax.
So far, the growing public opposition to the capitalist neo-liberal offensive (referred to as economic rationalism) has expressed itself in a distorted way in Australia, mainly because the organised working class has not consistently led this opposition. Unions opposed electricity privatisation in NSW but kept the fight inside the ALP, eschewing serious mass mobilisations.
The union movement's timidity has left openings for right-wing populist parties like Pauline Hanson's One Nation party. Despite being declared "dead" by the establishment media, One Nation scored an average of 10.5% in rural NSW and 5.9% in city seats.
In the Legislative Council (upper house), One Nation won the single biggest primary vote after Labor and the Coalition parties. But despite this vote, One Nation is likely to win just one upper house seat (for party leader David Oldfield).
Throughout the election campaign, the establishment media focused on the Labor and Coalition politicians' reactionary "law and order" script and whipped up a furore about the record number of smaller parties contesting the election, especially for the upper house which is elected by a preferential, proportional representation system.
Regrettably, parties like the Greens and the Australian Democrats tried to ride this media campaign — the latter campaigning on the slogan "Silence the lunatic fringe". This helped along the totally undemocratic campaign by the ruling-class parties to weaken, or make less democratic, the Senate and other proportionally elected upper houses that have hampered the pro-big business agendas of Coalition and Labor governments.
Fortunately, the media hysteria about the size of the upper house ballot collapsed somewhat when it became clear that most voters did not find this a big problem.
The large field in the upper house ballot means that its final composition will not be known for a few weeks, but the returned Carr Labor government will probably have only 16 of the 42 seats. The Greens will increase their presence to two, with Lee Rhiannon joining Ian Cohen after pulling 2.3% of the state-wide upper house vote.
The next best performer among the progressive parties which contested the upper house was the newly formed Progressive Labour Party (PLP) which obtained a surprising 1.4%, at the latest count. This was about the same vote as the "multiculturalist" party Unity received, but Unity benefits from greater preference flows than the PLP.
The PLP did not have much of a campaign, did not field lower house candidates and did not have a well-known candidate, so its significant vote is probably due to its name and position on the top line of the ballot paper.
The Democratic Socialists obtained 0.2% of the upper house vote and the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) received 0.1%. In the lower house seats, the Democratic Socialists received 2830 votes in 10 seats and the CPA 482 in one seat.
Because of opportunist preference deals and the registration of front parties, it is possible that one or two small right-wing parties which attracted fewer first preference votes than the Democratic Socialists and the CPA may get elected to the upper house.