BY TIM STEWART
BRISBANE Twenty-nine years ago, the Labor Party came to Musgrave Park and promised to do something for Aboriginal people, 29 years later and nothing's changed, indigenous activist Sam Watson told the 135 people who packed out the Queensland Council of Unions auditorium for the May 15 launch of the Socialist Alliance, which seeks to be the alternative Labor is not.
Watson told his audience of the history of Brisbane and of indigenous struggle, of the Gurindji land struggle in the Northern Territory in 1965, of Joh Bjelke-Petersen's state of emergency in 1971 during the visit to Queensland of the South African Springboks, when his police smashed anti-apartheid protests, and of the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in 1972.
Watson related both his pride in often being a part of this history, and also in being a part of the Socialist Alliance launch.
I'm going to join the Socialist Alliance, Watson said, I'm going to be a proud member of it.
The was meeting chaired by Jo Ball, an activist in Students Campaigning Against Multinationals and a member of Socialist Alternative, one of the alliance's component parties. Speakers at the meeting reflected the full range of activists who are backing the new grouping of socialist parties, and included a welcome from the indigenous Turrbal people, land claimants to the Brisbane area.
The formation of the Socialist Alliance is a radical step for the socialist left, but it's not just that, the Democratic Socialist Party's Karen Fletcher told the meeting. It's [also] a necessary campaigning vehicle in the fight against the big business agenda.
Lana Nadj from the International Socialist Organisation added that running Socialist Alliance candidates in the coming federal elections is a specific campaign that links the multi-issue campaigns against corporate tyranny.
We want to see the Socialist Alliance as a process of building unity, strength and ultimately winning victory for the anti-capitalist movement, she said.
Sacked union delegate Elliot Moreland spoke of the military-like precision with which employers like Caltex attack and isolate active workplace unionists like himself. Citing the 1998 maritime struggle, he attributed the problems of the trade union movement directly to the ALP.
Labor will not change. Labor is committed to running the system quietly. It hasn't even promised to scrap half the anti-worker laws the Liberals introduced, he remarked angrily.
On the other hand, I believe that the Socialist Alliance is committed to fighting for workers rights, said Moreland. It is about campaigning for full union rights, and it's about fighting the Liberals.
Messages of support were sent by Howard Guille, the state secretary of National Tertiary Education Union, and by Hughie Williams, the state secretary of the Transport Workers Union.