Bob Briton
A hung parliament with neither the ALP nor the Coalition able to claim government in their own right. That is the result of last Saturday’s federal election as The Guardian goes to press. It is a fitting outcome for the major parties. Labor, the Liberals and the Nationals have become completely remote from the communities they claim they want to serve. Their “solutions” to the pressing concerns of the people are less and less convincing and trust that they will ever deliver on their commitments has nosedived. Their close ties to the corporate sector are plain for all to see.
The Greens are on a completely different trajectory. They have arrived as the third major party, have won widespread support for a progressive agenda and have opened up the prospect of an Australian political scene free of the dominance of the two old parties of capital. Once this is achieved, the field will be open for other political forces, including clearly anti-monopoly ones, to take their rightful place in the political process.
Rise of the Greens
Powerbrokers in the major parties know they have got a problem. Speaking on the ABC’s panel commentating on the poll, outgoing Foreign Minister Stephen Smith observed that 40 percent of the electorate used to be “rusted on” to the ALP, 40 percent to the Coalition and the fight used to be for the support of the 20 percent who were not so committed. Now the major parties can claim the loyalty of 30 percent each and the battle is to gain the vote of the other 40 percent. Increasingly, that 40 percent is prepared to look beyond the more conventional (and very limited) “choices”.
This group of voters recognises that the difference between the program promoted by Gillard and Abbott was negligible. Draconian legislation restricting legitimate trade union activity, virtual inaction on climate change, harsh indifference to the plight of asylum seekers, further disempowerment of Aboriginal Australians, privatisation in health and education were on offer from both Labor and the Coalition. Both were serving up a version of the Howard era agenda so decisively rejected by the people in 2007. Regardless of the political stripe of the ultimate “victor”, the latest poll has rejected it again.
Also speaking on the election night broadcast was South Australian Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young. Her party had followed through with the predicted victory of candidate Adam Brandt in the seat of Melbourne – the first Greens MHR to be elected at a federal election.
Other candidates had run a strong second and third in their respective contests and it is clear the Greens will have the balance of power in the Senate. At the time of writing, the swing to the Greens was 3.8 percent. The swing to the Coalition was only 1.8 percent. Hanson-Young pointed out that if the Australian parliament were elected on a system of proportional representation, the Greens would have had 17 members of the new house of reps.
The SA Senator’s comment highlights the injustice and undemocratic nature of the current electoral system. For some time the Communist Party of Australia has been calling for a system of proportional representation to be introduced and, more than ever, it is an idea whose time has come.
Sources of dissatisfaction
The slump in the Labor vote could not be put down to any single cause. The way in which Rudd was dumped and Gillard was promoted went down badly in many quarters. Gillard’s subsequent gutting of the Resource Super Profits Tax was seen as hasty “backfill”. The rot had already set in when the most notable back flip of the Rudd government – the shelving of the Emissions Trading Scheme until 2013 – was announced.
The walking away from a response to climate change – the issue the former PM described as the “greatest moral challenge of our time” – was bewildering. The government was exposed as progressively more and more opportunistic and poll-driven, less and less committed to the hopeful message of their 2007 election campaign. Corporate influence over the policy agenda was becoming clearer as the months went by. In the end, the mining companies were effectively able to dictate that a new leader had to be found.
In NSW and Queensland voters appeared to punish federal Labour for the failure of their state counterparts. Gillard’s last minute commitment to a long-promised extension to the rail network in Sydney’s west was simply discounted. In WA voters were spooked by the fear campaign kept running by the smaller mining corporations about the downgraded super profits tax.
The reason the Coalition did not pick up more of the votes of disillusioned Labor supporters was that it was pursuing essentially the same strategy. It also wanted to lower corporate taxes, make life harder for those on pensions and benefits, break up and privatise the health system and bleed public schools of resources and enrolments.
The Libs’ paid parental leave scheme was seen as a PR fix for their quirky, reactionary leader rather than a commitment to working parents. Its gazumping of Labor’s spending promises sat oddly with its claim to adherence to that most sacred of neo-liberal beliefs – the budget surplus. Working people wondered where the funding was going to come from and concluded rightly that it would come out of services they rely on in health and education.
The Communist vote
The Communist Party is a member of the Communist Alliance which fielded candidates in the Senate in New South Wales and for the lower house seat of Sydney. The response to the Alliance’s campaign was encouraging, though the results overall were modest. At the time of writing, over 5,000 votes for Senate candidates Brenda Kellaway and Geoff Lawler had been counted. In the seat of Sydney, community activist Denis Doherty had received just under 500 votes or around one percent of first preferences.
A start has been made on the ongoing task of keeping the Communist option before the people at election time.
“The team that worked for the Communist Alliance in the seat of Sydney for the House of Reps and Senate candidates is pleased with the result. Many comrades and friends gave hours of their time to working on stalls, handing out leaflets and working on polling day,” Alliance candidate Denis Doherty told The Guardian.
“Two people decided to join our branch of the CPA and following our campaign supporting public housing tenants, they distributed their own leaflet supporting the Alliance and one worked for us on a polling booth.
“This gives us good opportunities to work for the people and to build our base in the community so that next time the word Communist on the ballot paper will attract more votes.”
Other branches reported similar positive outcomes with new recruits and respect in the community for the very active campaign in defence of people’s rights and living standards.
http://cpa.org.au/guardian/2010/1469/01-federal-election-2010.html
