[Socialism Today, No 17, April 1997, p. 21-24]
On his notorious 1995 trip to Rupert Murdoch’s luxurious Hayman Islands retreat, Tony Blair swapped notes with Australian premier Paul Keating. Since then, Keating has been pushed from office in a wave of disillusionment with Labor. Peter Taaffe looks at the lessons of Blair’s Australian model.
In scenes reminiscent of the bitter class conflict in 1980s Thatcherite Britain, trade unionists, students and indigenous people battled with police in the Australian federal capital of Canberra in August last year.
Fifty thousand demonstrators assembled in Canberra, while more than 10,000 marched in Adelaide and Brisbane. Some demonstrators stormed Parliament House in Canberra, chanting ‘Johnny, we’re coming to get you’, as they tried to reach the office of John Howard, the Liberal (conservative) Australian prime minister elected five months earlier in March. They were only prevented from reaching Howard’s office by riot police who brutally beat demonstrators and arrested more than 50 people, including supporters of the Australian Militant.
The Australian working class had been enraged by the government’s new attacks on the unions and also by the leaking of drastic ‘deficit cutting measures‘. Described by The Independent on Sunday as ‘one of the toughest budgets in memory’, Howard’s government announced its intention to cut $4.7bn (2.4 bn), to fall most heavily on the unemployed, Aborigines and students. Places on jobless programmes were to be reduced by 200,000 with further cuts in the next two years. Grants to universities were to be slashed and students expected to pay massively increased university fees. Up to 30,000 civil service jobs were expected to go and at least 11% cut in the total spending on indigenous Australians.
At the same time, the Howard government was proposing what has now become the Workplace Relations Act, which has undermined the fixing of wages and working standards through the ‘award’ system. In its place is a system of ‘workplace agreements’, designed to encourage individual agreements, undermine union power, weaken workers in negotiations, and weaken machinery which allowed complaints to be made if agreements were not honoured by employers. Strikes during the period of an agreement have been outlawed, heavy penalties for striking have been introduced, legislation against secondary boycotts has been strengthened and unfair dismissal grievance machinery has been rendered almost useless.
Howard was preceded at state level by those like Jeff Kennett, a brutal Thatcherite, who has systematically attempted to put the boot into the Victorian working class. (Victoria and the city of Melbourne is the heartland of the Australian labour movement.)
Nationally, strike statistics have soared since the Liberal/National Party coalition came to power. In its first three months, working days lost through strikes quadrupled to 320,000 compared to the previous quarter. Car workers, oil workers, construction workers, miners, as well as dockers, have all struck. In Melbourne, however, mounted police wielding batons, broke through a picket line at the glass factory owned by the British manufacturer, BIR. There has been a marked increase in strikes in Victoria in particular.
The changed situation is compared, unfavourably, by the leaders of the Australian Confederation of Trade Unions (ACTU) and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) to the alleged ‘cooperative society’, which held sway under the previous 13 years of Labor governments. In reality, the Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating resulted in mass disillusionment with Labor. Thatcherite type policies of cuts in living standards and privatisation were carried through – albeit achieved through the ‘Accords’ (tri-partite agreements between the government, employers and the union leaders) rather than the head-on confrontation favoured by Thatcher. This laid the basis for the return of the Liberal/National Party coalition. Howard is merely building on the considerable Thatcherite foundations laid down by Hawke and Keating.
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The experience of this period is important for the British working class because the Hawke/Keating ‘experiment’ (together with the Clinton presidency in the USA) is a model for a Blair-led Labour government. The rule of Hawke/Keating was marked by an unprecedented capitulation of the ALP to capitalism, both at home and abroad. John Pilger, in his marvellous book, The Silent Country, has detailed the shameful capitulation of Hawke to freebooter capitalists like Rupert Murdoch, Kerry Packer and Alan Bond (who now languishes in prison). The corruption, cronyism and collaboration with well-known gangsters, are set down in devastating detail by Pilger. Keating, while giving a more polished face – he preferred the antique room to the bar room – carried through the same policies as Hawke in deregulating the financial system and a mad programme of progressive reduction of tariffs and quotas. Together they systematically drove down the living standards of Australian workers through a series of ‘Accords’. A Blair government could try something similar.
The stated purpose of the accords was to ensure ‘fairness’ by holding down prices and wages. They only succeeded of course, like the prices and incomes policies under Labour governments in Britain in the past, in holding down wages while proving to be completely impotent where prices are concerned. The ruinous effects are shown in the bare statistics on income and wealth disparity in Australia today. In their detailed Australian perspectives document, the Australian Militant organisation point out: ‘Australia has among the worst figures in the OECD countries for income disparity and for poverty, we have an indigenous population who live in conditions more like the old Third World than a modern industrialised country, we have less government spending on public services’.
Outside Australia, particularly in Britain, the perception exists that Australia is still the ‘lucky country’. But the idea that it has not been as badly affected as the rest of the advanced industrial world is rapidly evaporating in Australia itself. Whereas wages were 63.5% of gross domestic product in 1974, by 1988/89 they had fallen to 51.1%. This was one consequence of the Hawke/Keating policies. Another is the undermining of the already weak industrial base of Australian capitalism through the policies of deregulation and a ‘open economy’.
The Hawke/Keating governments sought to replace lost trading relations, particularly with Britain, by opening up closer links to Asia and the rest of the world. This resulted in the floating of the Australian dollar, which collapsed, thus greatly increasing the prices of imported goods. The reduction of tariffs also devastated the already weak industrial base. The consequence is that there are now more foreign-owned industries in Australia than in any other advanced industrial country, with the exception of Canada. Australia generally imports more than it exports. The exceptions to this have only been in the years 1984-85, 1988-89, and in the recessionary period 1991.
For the working class, deregulation and capitulation to the untrammelled rule of capital, (allegedly because of ‘globalisation’) has been a catastrophe. John Pilger points out: ‘Long before most of the world, Australia had a minimum wage, child benefits, pensions and a vote for women. In the 1960s, Australians could boast the most equitable spread of personal income in the world. Thirty years later, this has been lost in the most spectacular redistribution of wealth since the Second World War … enthralled by the ‘market’, Labor abandoned its battlers, its ‘true believers’, and reversed the political compass. In ironic contrast to the long period of Liberal governments, the rich got richer and the poor poorer as never before’. Unemployment officially stands at 8.5% while one Australian paper recently said the real figure was 21% of the labour force. Welfare was cut back under Labor, and is being slashed by Howard, creating a growing army of poor. There are an estimated 200,000 children living in poverty in Sydney alone.
This has resulted in the complete shattering of the working-class base of the ALP. As with the Labour Party in Britain, it has now become a bourgeois party. The trade union link is still maintained, but it is more with the corrupt union tops than with ordinary trade unionists. Through a process of amalgamation there are now 20 ‘monster’ unions in Australia. In the main top-down and bureaucratic, the union leaders have shown incredible inertia in the teeth of the onslaught of the Howard government. There is more concern with guaranteeing their own bureaucratic privileges and the links to big business than mobilising the Australian workers. The leader of the ACTU, Bill Kelty, talking about his friendship with trucking boss and multi-millionaire, Lindsay Fox, recently declared, ‘It’s an emotional commitment and passion’. No such tender feelings were shown towards demonstrating trade unionists and others in Canberra last August. Faced with an hysterical campaign by the media, the ACTU leadership absolved Howard of all blame and condemned the demonstrators, shamefully offering to discipline those guilty of ‘violence’.
In Victoria, the attacks of the Kennett government on public-sector workers has met, for instance, on the part of the teachers’ leadership, with an acquiescence bordering on complete capitulation. Eight thousand teachers have already lost their jobs, hundreds of schools face closure, and wages and conditions are set to fall. This resulted in a one-day strike of Victorian teachers, in February, while I was in Australia. Four thousand gathered at an indoor meeting, but the union leaders offered absolutely no positive proposals for action to stop Kennett and the employers in their tracks. Faced with a concerted drive by the state government, and employment generally, to replace collective contracts with individual contracts an exodus from the union could temporarily take place. As in Britain casual employment and the replacement of full-time workers by part-time workers is on the increase.
At the same time, the frustration of workers at the inaction of the union tops has led to the formation of some new unions, such as the Shearers and Rural Workers’ Union. Workers at EP Robinson, in Geelong, broke away from the Australian Workers Union to join this new union. Similar developments cannot be excluded with other unions, but the main trend will be in the direction of attempting to transform the existing unions with the formation and growth of rank-and-file organisations. This will involve a mighty collision between the ranks of the unions and one of the most entrenched bureaucratic elites of any trade union leadership in the world.
In the 13 years of Labour government the trade union officialdom played more the role of policemen over the working class than their genuine representatives. The tendency was for the trade union tops to grow together with the capitalist state. Kelty, ACTU national secretary, for instance, sat on the Reserve Bank board. Massive salaries have been paid to some of the union officials (mostly recruited straight from university) justified by claims that they need ‚equal salaries to the chief executives of companies they negotiate with‘. There is a regular traffic between top positions in the unions and industrial relations experts and business consultants.
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With the shift of the ALP openly to the camp of capitalism, a huge vacuum now exists on the left. Into this has stepped Militant and other left forces. Although small at this stage, Militant, together with other left activists, played an important role in ensuring the victory which kept Richmond Secondary School open after the Kennett government attempted to close it. It is not just correct ideas but also action, particularly when it is successful, which establishes the authority of Marxism in this period.
This is why Militant Labour (now the Socialist Party) in Britain has a considerable authority, particularly in the eyes of the more advanced thinking layers of the working class, because it headed the successful anti-poll tax struggle and played a key role in the Liverpool battle between 1983-87. It is also to the fore in the battle against cuts in local government today as the experiences in Scotland, particularly in Glasgow, have shown. Similarly, Militant Labour in Southern Ireland led the marvellous anti-water charges campaign which compelled the coalition government to retreat. So also, the highly successful Youth against Racism in Europe campaign, with the blows it delivered against the neo-fascists in the early 1990s, established the authority of many different national sections of the Committee for a Workers’ International.
While fighting to build their own organisation, at the same time, Australian Militant supporters stand for the maximum unity in action of all genuine socialist forces in Australia. As with Britain, where the mass of the working class is now politically disenfranchised, Australian Militant supporters stand for the creation of a new mass workers’ party. Tentative steps have been made towards this with the formation of the New Labor Party (NLP). Initiated by an older layer of workers in Newcastle (New South Wales) it has also found an echo in Melbourne and elsewhere. A party in the process of formation it is, at the moment, open and inclusive and could gather support, not just from the more experienced layers but from fresh forces, environmentalists, unemployed, above all, from the youth who are looking for a socialist alternative.
Whether or not it becomes a substantial force, it is a promising beginning. But even if the NLP does not take off, lodged in the explosive situation in Australia is the inevitability of the development of a mass socialist working-class party at a certain stage. If the left does not manage to utilise the opportunities which now loom in Australia, reaction will. Already Pauline Hanson MP, (an ex-member of Howard’s National Party), reflecting the enraged petit bourgeoisie (appropriately she is a fish-and-chip shop owner) has been joined by Graham Campbell, another MP, in whipping up racism, particularly against Aborigines and Asian immigrants. As the Bible says, at the moment, this is a cloud no bigger than the size of a man’s fist. But the Howard government has itself clamped down on immigration. Australia is, it seems, full up! This in a country which is founded on immigration, which is a continent bigger than Europe, with the second lowest population density in the world.
It is the limitations of capitalism, its incapacity to take society forward, to develop the productive forces, science, technique and the organisation of labour, which is responsible for mass unemployment, increased poverty, homelessness, etc. The growth of small racist and neo-fascist groups has already provoked a backlash with the mobilisation, for instance, in Melbourne, of the left against the opening of a neo-fascist bookshop. The exceptional circumstances of the past for Australia, particularly during the boom of 1950-75, have disappeared, probably for ever.
The consciousness of the mass of the population has not yet fully caught up with this. But when it does, as it surely will, it will share in the fate of the rest of the capitalist world of social and political convulsions. The Australian working class has powerful traditions. As John Pilger reminds us, the silver and zinc miners of Broken Hill won the world’s first 35-hour week, half a century ahead of Europe and the USA. In the economic and social storms which loom, those marvellous traditions will be rekindled.
There are some parallels between the situation in the USA at the end of the last century and the beginning of this century. Only when the possibilities of internal migration to the West had dried up did the labour movement develop on an all-US scale. Today in Australia, it is not the limits of internal migration but the restrictions imposed by capitalism which can no longer take society forward. This has ended the vision of Australia as a land of ‘unlimited opportunities’. There is, moreover, a powerful labour and socialist tradition. These will come to the fore in the next period. Once the Australian working class moves its effects will be felt, not just in the advanced industrial countries, particularly Britain with its ethnic and historical links, but throughout Asia.
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