'The big parties got it wrong'
By Steve Painter
CANBERRA — Phil Cleary is angry. The first non-Labor member for the Wills electorate is in his office in Parliament House, watching a closed circuit television relay of the prime minister's report to parliament on his trip to Indonesia. "How come the Dili massacre is a 'killing', but Tienanmen Square is a 'massacre'?", Cleary asks.
"We've got a prime minister who talks about standing on our own two feet and breaking the old connections with Olde England, but we still follow the American foreign policy, just like we followed them into the Gulf War."
Long before he ever thought of contesting the Wills by-election, thereby causing one of the biggest upsets in recent electoral history, Cleary was interested in international issues: "I stood on public platforms in opposition to the Gulf War, and apartheid, I made statements about East Timor".
Unusual for a professional football coach and occasional sports journalist? Perhaps, but Cleary was also a strong trade unionist during a 13-year career as a teacher, most of it in working-class Sunshine. That was "when there was lots of branch action, in the rugged old days of the late '70s. Later on there was an agreement reached so that strike action became less significant, and it was centralised rather than spontaneously coming out of branch decisions."
Since the by-election, sections of the media have described Cleary's election as a one-off result, an aberration, but he's not convinced: "People just feel that the two parties are so similar that maybe there's going to be a new development".
Labels
During the by-election, the media described Cleary as a leftist, but he says labels are not useful, though he's familiar with the left from his days as a student at La Trobe University in the early '70s.
"When I was asked if I was a socialist, I said it would serve no purpose for me to call myself that, because what would you take that to mean? Which form of socialism? The Stalinist form, the Trotskyist form? Why not just say: this is what I stand for. Even now, when they call me left, what does it mean? If you say socialist, there's a reaction because there are some bad track records to worry about."
The Wills campaign was built around issues rather than labels. "I didn't put any label beside my name, others put that there: left-leaning, etc, and they said that the ultraleft unions were supporting me, whatever they were. "The facts are: I had moral support from some unions, but beyond that nothing of an official kind. There was moral support from the unions, and there were people from the union movement who got out and worked for us.
"My position's a bit eclectic, I suppose. I just said what I stood for. I'm against privatisation, I'm for social justice, I'm for a new debate about jobs and making jobs a high priority, I'm opposed to the GST.
"But you can't be doctrinaire, and sometimes people of the left are doctrinaire. They fail to understand that when you're dealing with a range of working people, you've got to be saying things that are, not so much uncomplicated, but about the meaning of their life — not some doctrinaire, obscure arguments about left theory, which are often just an indulgence."
During the campaign, some Trotskyists branded Cleary a Stalinist because of his stand against removing tariffs so long as that would result in job losses and there were no alternative jobs. "There was absolutely no basis for calling me a Stalinist."
Tariffs
The tariff question was mainly a symbol, "a way into the discussion of jobs. It was an argument about protecting jobs. In principle, tariffs are not necessarily the way to go", but there have to be alternative jobs for people to go to if their jobs are going to be lost through a deliberate decision of the government. Until that happens, the tariffs should stay.
Of course, tariffs and jobs are part of a much larger discussion about the economy and economic efficiency, but perhaps we should be looking at other measures of efficiency besides the market so beloved of the economic rationalists who dominate economic discussion at the present time.
"There's no doubt that we should be developing things that we have comparative advantage in, that our environment enables us to produce efficiently, and of course we should be taking into account the question of the consumption of energy involved in our lives.
"We can't just keep wantonly abusing the earth the way we are, and misusing resources. Those are more decent notions of efficiency than the ones bandied around by the economic rationalists."
Working class
While he avoids labels, Cleary has no hesitation describing himself as working class at a time when most politicians prefer to claim Australia is a classless society. "When I taught history I taught Australian history, I taught labour history, I taught kids about the unions, union history, the strikes of the 1890s, and union culture, songs, Henry Lawson. I had a strong sense of working-class life. "The things I said in the campaign were the right things, I suppose, to be saying in that electorate. But they're things that I think generally anyway; it's not like I deliberately said, 'Right, I'll argue these things because this is the electorate'. I argued them because I believed in them, and because I'd seen that the Labor Party, which many people had perceived as a party of social reform", had ceased to be anything of the sort over the past 10 years.
So, a working-class candidate won a traditional Labor seat. It was a sign of the times that the ACTU took the very unusual step of endorsing Cleary and the Democrat candidate on the same level as the ALP, on the basis of their answers to a questionnaire.
What has happened to Labor is "bizarre, really", says Cleary. Though "some would say it's no surprise. To stay in power the party would have to adopt the laws of free enterprise, and that's what it has done. The party has become obsessed with staying in power. That's one side of it. The other side is this obsession with economic rationalism, which is really the classic free enterprise system without government intervention, or with minuscule intervention.
"It's hard to know what has been happening. Everyone says the left has been marginalised and there are no dreamers and idealists and passionate reformers within the party any longer. They have been marginalised, and the pursuit of ministries and power has become their raison d'etre. That's a bit of a sad thing; there are good people there, but they're a minority. It will be interesting to see what does happen in the party, whether the reformers will return.
"It's interesting how Keating is talked of as a visionary, but I don't know what his vision really is. He's an intriguing man in many ways, but he's losing the plot."
One Labor politician told Cleary there's a feeling that the party is "dominated by 'mental labouring classes'. They've had no kind of manual work experience. They don't like the idea of manufacturing; they think it's dirty, but they think tourism is clean. But what do people make in the tourist industry? Wash toilets, work as waiters."
The people dominant in the Labor Party "don't really think seriously about industry policy, they don't know where the industries will be, they don't know what sort of labour. We can't all be sitting at computer terminals, we can't all be sitting in universities. And they also do things like bring in university fees, which discriminate against working class kids straight away. What is their real vision? Is the vision restricted to the flag?
"Keating's just discovered the flag's got a Union Jack on it, and we're hearing these nonsense stories about if we change the flag we'll be respected in Asia. Most Asians probably wouldn't know what's on our flag."
Real discussion
Despite the lack of vision in parliament, real discussion about the elsewhere. "I keep saying that I'm really just a reflection of what was happening in Wills. People on the left shouldn't assume that their theoretical knowledge always means they know more than the person who doesn't have that academic knowledge.
"And you shouldn't think that because people don't talk in the language of the economic bureaucrats in Canberra, they don't understand what's happening, because they do. In Wills they obviously did: they were talking really critically about what was happening in parliament. They might have been talking differently, but they were talking critically.
"Both the big parties got it wrong. Their attitude was almost contemptuous. The Labor candidate's slogan was 'One Who Listens', but people didn't just want to be listened to, they wanted to be talked to as well. I had to take the issues out and back in, and I did that with the help of a whole lot of people around me who were talking things through too.
"There was a great dialogue going on in the Wills electorate. There were all sorts of people talking and raising ideas and talking about Keating, Hewson, the GST, the parties, manufacturing. Old people would say they could remember when there great industries in the area, people talked about imports, people from the ethnic communities were concerned about their lives.
"People still have a vision, and just because the politicians don't have it doesn't mean that there aren't people out there with it. The politicians didn't understand the electorate. They said it was diverse, but they thought diverse just meant a number of ethnic groups, so they thought, we'll put a Greek in and he'll get the vote. Some Greeks said to me, 'Do they think because I'm Greek I've got to vote for a Greek?' There were lots of things happening — probably more than I understood."
As for his own vision: "I would like a fairer, just society that's not based around the pursuit of the commodity. The environmental question, if examined properly, relates to the problems of capitalism and its obsession with the production of goods. We move along that path and the environment is consumed in the process.
"We've got to come to the realisation that life is about relationships — not in hippie terms, but we've got to put more store on those sorts of things rather than thinking our life is only about the consumption of goods. I can't believe that we do some of the things we do to the earth."
In the past few days the parliament discussed a bill on the Lucas Heights nuclear facility, and for some politicians the main issue was our capacity to become a site for dumping nuclear waste. "These are just absurd ideas. Rather than questioning the whole concept of nuclear energy, instead of talking about solar or other ways of producing energy, we're talking about how to make a buck out of nuclear waste." Now some of the media are saying Cleary won't be able to do anything useful in Canberra. He responds that he's in a position to be far more effective than the average Labor backbencher, who's dominated by cabinet and machine politics. "If I was in the Labor Party I'd be more restricted, I couldn't pick the PM up on his statement about East Timor, for example.
"But apart from that, the work I can do back in the electorate is just as important. Already I've attracted a great deal of interest because I've taken up some of that ground that the Labor Party used to hold, that people actually think is important, and there are a range of other questions that have just got to be considered."