By Ray Fulcher
MELBOURNE — One year after the election of a Liberal government, Victorians are facing a worsening standard of living. Official unemployment is 13%, and in some areas youth unemployment is 40%.
Premier Jeff Kennett is shifting the burden of the recession onto the shoulders of those who can least afford it.
The public sector is reeling. Thousands more jobs are to be cut from the public service, and attacks continue on public transport, health, education and a range of social services, including welfare support agencies, where the government plans to cut $7.4 million from non-government bodies' funds.
Education is also a victim, with another 3000 teacher jobs to be lost this year. School closures and amalgamations are continuing. The government wants to increase teachers' classroom time in order to make up for the reduction of teacher numbers in schools.
Industrial action by teachers unions to combat the government's attacks was called off by the unions' leaders because the action might jeopardise their case for a federal award, currently before the IRC.
According to opinion polls, the teachers had 57% community support for their action. Even though the teachers did not go out, many high school students decided to take action and struck on September 7 against attacks on their education.
With the teachers being held back, school principals have stepped to the fore and are refusing to forward to the Education Department names or numbers of "excess" teachers. The principals believe that the education system cannot sustain any more cuts.
The government claims that 200,000 of the state's workers are now covered by individual contracts. Trades Hall says that this figure is an exaggeration and that, with "very few exceptions", the individual contracts are in "non-union backwaters of the labour market". With union membership falling, this assurance is not very reassuring for workers. Trades Hall appears to have no plans to unionise and organise workers in the ever-expanding "backwaters of the labour market".
Faced with attacks on working people from every direction, the trade union movement appears paralysed. Trades Hall's strategy of shifting workers to federal awards, having the occasional rally and hoping that the ALP gets re-elected in three years has proved useless to the majority of workers. Unions such as FIMEE see even this as being too radical and have refused to support the October 6 demonstration against Kennett.
"Trades Hall's strategy is proving totally ineffective", Democratic Socialist spokesperson Sue Bolton told Green Left Weekly. "Waiting for Labor to be returned is hopeless. Our working conditions, our standard of living, our services are under attack now. We need to defend ourselves now."
Bolton says the shift to federal awards has been used by the union leadership to defuse any militancy on the part of workers. "Not all workers can shift to a federal award", she said. "Nor will a federal award stop you being sacked, as the rail workers can tell you. A federal award won't stop cuts in health, education or public transport. It is a do-nothing strategy."
To defeat the austerity measures of the Kennett government, the unions would need to break with the Labor Party, says Bolton. "It was the previous Labor government which began many of the attacks now being carried out in full by the Liberals. Labor laid the groundwork for Kennett."
There is no guarantee that a future state ALP government would reverse the cuts put in place by the Liberals, Bolton said. It may even extend them: the federal Labor government is engaged in attacks on living conditions, health and education which differ from Kennett's only in the speed with which they are delivered.
"Labor shares the Liberals' 'economic rationalist' agenda of privatisation, tariff cuts and labour market 'reform'. The major parties differ only on how to achieve these objectives and at what pace."
Many people seem prepared to fight. There is a high level of community resistance to closing down or reducing of services. "What's lacking is the political will on the part of the union leadership to coordinate the anger and willingness to fight that exists", said Bolton. Unions such as the Victorian Secondary Teachers' Association have actively prevented a coordinated fight back.
The VSTA refuses to have an all-in industrial campaign involving all teachers, instead saying that it will support any branch which takes action. That is equivalent to calling for no industrial action, when members know that to take action as an individual branch would be like a green light to Kennett for closing their school.
But while industrial action is important in the fight against Kennett, Bolton said, it is not enough. "The fight is above all a political one. The labour movement has to engage in a mass struggle to win the broader public, to clarify the issues and unite all those sectors threatened by the pro-big business agenda of both major parties."
The Democratic Socialists sees the key challenge facing all those under attack — whether by Liberal or Labor governments — as the building of an alternative political party which can lead the fight for the interests of workers and ordinary people.
Bolton stresses that for such a party to be effective, it would have to be more than just another parliamentary party. It would have to contest elections, but it would also have to be committed to independent mass action, to mobilising and empowering masses of ordinary people who are excluded from and alienated by mainstream parliamentary politics.
"Those unions that want to be more than boosters for the election of pro-big business Labor governments could lead the way by breaking from Labor and striking out with all those community forces that believe that people's needs should come before corporate profits."