Dick Nichols
The last month of federal parliament's winter session has seen a chain of dizzying backflips by the federal Labor "opposition".
For six or seven months Labor leader Mark Latham seemed to promise something a bit better than the hated Coalition government, opposing increased Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme (PBS) co-payments and involvement in the criminal war in Iraq.
But Labor has been dropping or moderating its opposition to the point that it increasingly recalls Kim Beazley standing "shoulder-to-shoulder" with PM John Howard on the 2001 Tampa crisis — a losing tactic rightly criticised by Latham himself.
What's going on? An unplanned ALP rout? Or is the federal Labor war room involved in a clever operation to neutralise Howard's pre-election moves on issues like gay marriage and the Free Trade Agreement, by sticking them in the temporary cold storage of a Senate committee?
Whatever the answers to such questions are, this is surely the sort of calculus that's occupying the attention of ALP leaders. After all, every capitulation before Howard — whether on "anti-terrorism" legislation, gay marriage or Tasmanian forests — hands thousands of new votes to Labor's left; mainly to the Greens but also to the Socialist Alliance.
The ALP's judgement is obviously that it can still afford to lose such primary votes — in the inner suburbs and among poorer workers, migrant communities and the "battlers" in general — because they'll overwhelmingly return to it as second preferences. And that if Latham can't win back the swinging vote in the outer metropolitan seats he simply won't win government.
There is one way Labor could win, however: If it stressed points of difference with Howard — maintaining opposition to increases in the PBS co-payment, offering tax cuts to those millions of low-paid workers who've been most ripped off by the Coalition, opposing the Iraq war and Australian participation 100% and explaining a few simple truths (such as the fact that Howard's "anti-terrorism" legislation is an attack on everyone's democratic liberties). Then the ALP would be seen to be a real alternative, reaping the benefits on polling day.
But then it wouldn't be Labor, and Latham wouldn't be Latham. Because there's no way the ALP and its leader will risk the wave of corporate blackmail and media abuse that such an approach would bring down on their heads.
Since Labor won't be making its rhetorical differences from Howard real and substantial, its ability to differentiate itself from the Coalition as a caring party of "social reform" is now going up in smoke. After only seven months the shiny Latham paint job is beginning to peel badly, revealing the old Hawke-Keating jalopy beneath.
But why is a vote for Mark Latham increasingly beginning to look like a vote for John Howard? For starters, Labor had no choice but to support the tax-cut bribes and other goodies in the last budget, paid for by three years of attacks on the most defenceless in this society.
More importantly, Labor stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the Coalition in its support for corporate Australia and its acceptance of what "responsible" economic policy is. Indeed, the ALP still feels, despite all that former Labor leaders Hawke, Keating and Co. did in government from 1983 to 1996, that it must continue to prove its trustworthiness.
That's why shadow finance minister Bob McMullan is offering guarantees of reliability that it wouldn't even occur to federal treasurer Peter Costello and the Coalition to make. Like the undertaking that an ALP government will maintain a budget surplus for six years and that it will reduce federal government expenditure as a percentage of national income.
This is standard for Labor parties facing or holding government. It's as if they have to prove to the real masters of the house that they can be entrusted with the family porcelain. Indeed, so obsessive is Labor's desire to show that it is a reliable steward of the economy that an eminent stockbroker (recently interviewed by researchers from the Swinburne University of Technology's Institute for Social Research) described Australia's ALP-run states and territories as "undergeared". They were all using less debt to fund longer-term infrastructure expenditure than would the average big company.
McMullan's undertakings guarantee that a good deal of the funds the ALP needs for its tax and family policies will have to be sourced from existing expenditure, where Labor says it has identified $10 billion in "waste".
Some funds may come from cuts to the more outrageous tax dodges (which amount to $8.2 billion annually according to the Australian Council of Social Services), but large chunks will be drawn from cuts to the social security budget, where we can expect to see the true Mark Latham intensifying his war on the "undeserving" poor — those young people expected to be either "learning or earning".
It certainly won't be coming from a bloated defence budget, given Labor's attmepts to out-do the Coalition's credentials in the war on terrorism and "homeland security".
The big risk in Labor's lurch to the right is that it will simply repeat Beazley's 2001 fiasco. Above all, its position of partial withdrawal of Australian troops from Iraq will encourage Howard to intensify his attack. Labor foreign affairs spokesperson Kevin Rudd already talks gobbledegook when he tries to explain why Labor is for a UN presence in Iraq, supportive of the new Iraqi "government" and for the US alliance, but against the presence of Australian troops which would strengthen these three "good" things.
Of course, Labor could still defeat Howard. Howard is hated, and a Latham government would have one big advantage — it wouldn't be a Howard government. And a Latham government with a strengthened Green presence in the Senate could even pass some progressive legislation as sugar-coating on the ongoing bitter pill of economic rationalism.
But what a Latham government would be also depends on us. The movements for social and environmental justice in this country should keep in mind how easy it was for the Hawke government — which tamed the unions through the Prices and Incomes Accord — to implement the key points of the economic rationalist agenda in the early 1980s.
Avoiding a repeat of those years requires three things.
The first is as large a left vote as possible: First for the Socialist Alliance and then the Greens, before preferencing Labor before the Coalition parties. The larger that vote, the clearer the message will be, that in supporting a Labor government over Howard we are in no way endorsing Latham's project.
Rather, we should see a Latham victory as immediately opening the struggle against all that is backward, anti-democratic, anti-working class and anti-environmental in Labor's program.
The second is to maintain and strengthen the movements for environmental and social justice. It is they, and certainly not Labor in Canberra, that have most led the opposition to Howard — on war, union rights and refugees. For example, through its work the refugee-rights movement has succeeded in converting refugees from "queue-jumpers" to human beings in the eyes of the majority of Australians. This obviously led Howard to try to neutralise the issue by admitting Afghan refugees from Nauru.
These movements will be just as necessary against a future Labor government.
The third is to strengthen the Socialist Alliance as the core of the party that working people in Australia need but don't have. The alliance has been at the centre of the anti-war movement and is crucial to the struggle to revive democratic, fighting unionism in this country.
The stronger the Socialist Alliance is, the stronger these movements will be, and the greater our power of resistance against whichever pro-corporate party wins the coming federal poll.
[Dick Nichols is the managing editor of Seeing Red, the magazine of social, political and cultural dissent launched by the Socialist Alliance.]
From Green Left Weekly, July 7, 2004.
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