Labor, Greens and independents in government

Less than five years after the landslide defeat of the hated Howard government in 2007, Labor is so unpopular that the return of the Liberals to office seems assured. By the 2010 election Labor was already close to losing office. Despite the much-vaunted success of the Australian economy since the start of the global economic crisis, both parties’ 2010 election policies made clear their commitment to the capitalist class’s desire for pre-emptive austerity measures (cuts to public spending, a budget surplus) while business profits were propped up. Both parties went to the 2010 election committed to a reactionary consensus: undermining workers’ rights while kowtowing to the ultra-wealthy, continuing the slaughter in Afghanistan, locking up refugees behind razor wire, and continuing the genocide of Aboriginal people.

The result of Labor’s 2010 election campaign was that the ultra-reactionary Tony Abbott came within a whisker of winning. The ALP could not form government without the support of the Greens’ single House of Representatives member, Adam Bandt, and three independents – the ex-Nationals Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, and former Green Andrew Wilkie. Some on the left welcomed the formation of this minority government as a positive outcome. It supposedly presented an opportunity for progressive advance. The day after the election long-time left wing activist Tim Anderson declared:

Unexpectedly…a great opportunity for social change has emerged… The August election was a strong statement against…shallow electoral politics…there is room for a range of new voices, including the Greens, including the maverick MPs, but also including all those of us who have been disillusioned with conventional politics.^[i]

Prominent Greens member (and former Democrat senator) Andrew Bartlett, argued that:

this new parliament is likely to be quite different, and most likely better… The difference of real significance will be a transfer in power from the Executive back to the Parliament… What this will mean is not only greater transparency and accountability. It will also mean more genuine consideration given to private members’ business.^[ii]

Similarly, Guy Rundle’s Crikey article, “We’re entering a new dimension here, people”, waxed lyrical about “the possibility of new processes, and new flows which make provisional blocs in different ways. It’s the most imaginative solutions that become the most possible”. Even more over the top was Rundle’s claim that “The mere process over the last three days has done more to make visible the invisible structures of power, and their potential (if not straightforward) transformability, than a hundred civics lessons”.^[iii] Perhaps as an indication of how low some of the left’s expectations for change have become, long-time socialist and one of the founders of the Sydney Greens, Hall Greenland, in an article entitled “The best available government”, claimed that:

This moment opens up new configurations and new balances of forces which are more hopeful for those who are campaigning for a good life beyond consumer capitalism, for the society of the free and equal, for sharing the wealth, for an economy which respects the environment, and for a break with US military adventures… It might not be quite a political Spring, but it is an advance on the deeper winter that could have been.^[iv]

From this perspective, the election outcome could apparently help to move even the ALP to the left:

The opportunity now exists in the Labor Party to roll back the power and influence of the discredited right wing faction bosses. What will act as an additional spur is the rise of the Greens who increased their share of the vote by 50 percent — mostly at the expense of rightward-shifting Labor… For the moment, the Greens and the independents are driving the new government, insisting on (and achieving) promises of more debate in parliament, more consultation and more freedom to introduce legislation. The Greens are also demanding consideration of a higher super-tax on mining profits, withdrawal from Afghanistan, a price on carbon, same-sex marriage and a reduction of fetters on union action. A still shell-shocked and grateful Labor leadership is entertaining all these proposals.^[v]

Socialist Alternative’s was one of the few voices to state that there was “nothing positive about the rise of the independents”.^[vi] But this argument was very much against the stream of left wing opinion which expressed confidence in the hung parliament, in parliamentary processes as important for progressive change and, most surprisingly, in the progressive nature of the independents.

Predictably, two years down the track, all of these hopes have proven to be illusions. Labor has continued on its rightward, anti-working class trajectory. Tragically, no sizeable force outside parliament – most importantly the trade union leadership – has been willing to stand up to the ALP government. After the greatest success in their history, the Greens have devoted themselves to propping up the Gillard government, and their electoral advance has stalled. The independent MPs have made no impact – and given their politics, this is a good thing. Everything that has happened since 2010 has paved the way for a sweeping Liberal victory.

Gillard’s Labor bankrupt from the start

Labor did deservedly badly in the 2010 election. They stood for nothing but the policies they had pursued since their return to office in 2007, continuing in substance (if occasionally not in name) the right wing attacks of the preceding Howard government. The ALP’s primary vote fell from 43.4 percent in 2007 to just 38.0 percent. In raw figures they lost almost 677,000 votes, with a primary swing away from the ALP in almost every state and territory. But it was a collapse of the ALP vote and not a surge to the Liberals that delivered the hung parliament. The official figures show a swing of 2.6 percent from Labor to the Coalition. However there were two other largely unremarked but important reasons why Labor’s vote fell: hundreds of thousands either didn’t vote, or voted informal, an 85-year high. Overwhelmingly, the boycott rate rose most in safe Labor seats. Of the 30 seats with the biggest growth in the numbers not voting, 23 were Labor seats, six Coalition and one independent (Bob Katter’s seat of Kennedy). The 14 seats with the highest informal votes were all Labor seats in western Sydney, i.e. in the state that had had a right wing Labor state government for the longest. In Blaxland, the western Sydney seat once represented by Paul Keating, 14.1 percent of votes cast were informal, up from 8.9 percent in 2007.

Disappointment in Labor’s right wing record in government showed in other electorates. In 2007, the Northern Territory seat of Lingiari achieved a historically high turnout of 77 percent, as Aboriginal voters showed their determination to vote against the Howard government’s Intervention into their communities. The Coalition’s vote, already a low 21 percent in 2004, sank to 12 percent in 2007. But since Labor continued and in fact intensified the racist policies of the Intervention, the turnout rate dropped 5.4 percent, the informal vote rose 2.7 percent, and just 70 percent of those on the roll cast a formal vote, with a swing against Labor of 7.4 percent. Summing up the Australian Electoral Commission data, Age columnist Tim Colebatch wrote

More people refused to vote…than at any time since compulsory voting began in 1925… More than 14 million…were on the rolls… But almost a million of them decided not to vote. And of those who did, almost 730,000 voted informal. More precisely, it turned off more Labor voters than any other election for decades. Some voted for the Greens. Some voted informal. Some didn’t bother to vote at all. But few crossed over to vote for the Coalition… The Coalition’s vote rose only by the barest margin… Election 2010 was a negative campaign, where the leaders stood for less than ever before, and insulted voters’ intelligence more than ever before. Both sides asked us to vote against their opponent, rather than giving us reasons to vote for them. And more than ever, voters – especially, but not only, Labor voters – responded by refusing to give their vote to either side.^[vii]

The two years since the election have been a concentrated example of everything that is wrong with Labor in government. Gillard’s minority government is in complete crisis, despised by both the left and the right. As Corey Oakley summarised it a year after the election:

Her relentlessly right wing agenda has not only led to demoralisation and despair among the left and traditional Labor supporters, it has also galvanised the Liberal Party and Tony Abbott’s lunatic cheer squad of shock-jock radio hosts and Murdoch opinion writers… Within days of taking over the leadership last year, Gillard abandoned one of the few popular policies of the Rudd government – the Resources Super-Profits Tax – completely capitulating to pressure from the mining billionaires to drop a tax that had clear majority support. Next she dropped any pretence that Labor had a humane refugee policy, vilifying asylum seekers in a desperate bid to outdo Abbott’s vile “stop the boats” rhetoric… On [other] social issues, Gillard has gone out of her way to antagonise Labor’s own supporters. In spite of an increasing majority in society that supports same-sex marriage, Gillard has repeatedly emphasised her opposition to changing the Marriage Act… [and] is implementing a reactionary carbon tax that will end up hurting workers’ living standards while doing nothing for the environment. Predictably, this has only further alienated Gillard from working class voters. ^[viii]

Labor’s right wing policy program has only strengthened the hand of the Liberals. Newspoll’s surveys of voting intentions show that by July 2011 the Labor vote dipped below 30 percent, and has generally stayed there.^[ix] Such is the crisis for Labor that a post-2012 budget primary vote of 30 percent is described as a “bounce” – at the same time as the Coalition’s 55 to 45 percent two-party preferred polling would mean a resounding victory for them and Labor reduced to a pathetic rump.^[x]

It’s not as if there aren’t lessons for Labor from the last decade. State by state – in Victoria, NSW, and Queensland – Labor’s right wing policies have paved the way for Coalition victories.^[xi] When Labor suffered a historic defeat in 2011, NSW ALP apparatchik Luke Foley bemoaned the facts – “the heaviest defeat in our 120 year history”, “our lowest vote since 1904, and winning our lowest number of seats since 1898”, “Labor was able to staff fewer polling booths than at any election since the 1930s”, and so on. What Foley couldn’t face up to was that Labor drove its supporters into the arms of the Liberals. The unprecedented swing against NSW Labor’s anti-working class policies meant that “one in three voters who expressly identify themselves as Labor did not vote Labor on Saturday”.^[xii] Labor’s primary vote was down to little more than 25 percent. The warnings of what Liberal leader Barry O’Farrell might do cut no ice when compared to what Labor had already done for the previous 16 years. All the Liberals had to do was shut up about their own commitment to neoliberalism.

When Labor was decimated at the subsequent Queensland election in 2012, their record of privatising state assets didn’t just make them unpopular, it also ensured that many unions ran dead during the election. Important blue collar unions affiliated with the ALP – the construction division of the CFMEU, the Rail, Bus and Tramways Union and the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) – refused to help the party. In an appallingly stupid and futile protest against Labor’s right wing policies the CFMEU, the Australian Institute of Marine and Power Engineers and Dean Mighell of the Victorian ETU also gave political and financial backing to Bob Katter’s reactionary Australian Party.^[xiii]

Those on the left who put their hopes in the parliamentary process and the supposed “end to the two party system” forgot a basic truth: that the real struggle between reaction and progress lies outside parliament. With no end in sight to global economic crisis, there is worldwide pressure on governments of every political hue to cut back spending and attack working class organisation and living standards. Labor’s trajectory is not unique. In countries like Spain and Greece the social democratic parties, loyal servants of capital, have undermined their own bases of support as they’ve imposed the draconian austerity measures demanded by the capitalist class.

Committed as they are to carrying out whatever attacks on workers’ living standards the ruling class demands, Gillard’s government has been incapable of articulating a clear message to its supporters about the state of the economy. This is made worse by the contradictions they confront with no solutions. In order to boost business “confidence” and consumer spending, the government and its top bureaucrats are constantly talking up the state of the economy. The head of the Treasury Department, Martin Parkinson, told a Senate hearing:

It is almost as if most Australians seem to think we live in Greece. We don’t. We actually have an incredibly bright future ahead of us.^[xiv]

This ignores the reality of both the unevenness of the Australian economy, and the impact of world economic events here. According to CommSec in April 2012:

In the last two quarterly reports, we judged that Australia’s multi-speed economy could more accurately be described as a three-speed economy. But in the latest report the best way to describe the situation is Western Australia first and daylight second… Across Australia all state and territory economies except Western Australia are struggling for momentum.^[xv]

This is particularly the case in the two most populous states. Victoria’s economic growth has been weaker than almost every other state over the past decade with this likely to intensify as tax revenue slows while debt levels rise. Reserve Bank figures show average growth per head of population in Victoria has been running at only 1.5 percent – about half the rate of inflation – over the past 10 years. It has the weakest growth rate apart from NSW.^[xvi] On 7 May 2012 the Herald Sun was able to provide the following list of Victorian job cuts in the year to date: Commonwealth Bank 100, state public service 4200, Optus 750, ANZ 600, Qantas 400, Toyota 350,1st Fleet 150, SPC Shepparton 150, Heinz Girgarre 146, Commonwealth Bank 100, O-I Australia 70, Murray Goulburn 64, CMI Industrial 44, and Mars Ballarat 38. A further 660 jobs at Qantas and 600 at Alcoa were listed as “under threat”.^[xvii] No wonder Labor’s rhetoric about how great things are does not resonate with the actual experiences of many of its working class supporters, who are fearful of losing their jobs and forced to pay more and more for basic necessities like electricity, water and gas.

The one positive side to the utter disarray of the Gillard government is that its very unpopularity and its desire to avoid absolute electoral oblivion, while not enough to hold back the neoliberal program in toto, has tempered it to a limited degree. The 2012 budget, for example, while on paper achieving the holy grail of a surplus, was accompanied by some half-hearted class rhetoric from Wayne Swan, and a small degree of attempted vote-buying payouts to the poor. Any weakening of the economy will most likely see this disappear, and an increase in the austerity measures already in place by governments of all persuasions, just as it has in Europe.

The Greens

In the 2010 election the Greens polled almost half a million more votes than in 2007. They were able to capture a larger section of Labor’s former left wing constituency – five out six of their votes came from disaffected Labor voters. The swing to the Greens was 3.8 percent, bigger than the swing of 1.9 percent to the Coalition. More than 1.3 million voted Green. There were widespread illusions that the Greens would offer concerted opposition to, and perhaps even reverse Labor’s right wing agenda.

However these hopes of many on the left were far from fulfilled. After signing a deal to support the minority government, the Greens settled into just voicing mild criticisms of the ALP on some issues but doing nothing to mobilise serious opposition. It isn’t as if the leading Greens did not give enough warning of how they would act. In an interview immediately before the 2010 election, Bob Brown proclaimed that the Greens had “shown a responsibility that the Coalition has shunned… We’ve been able to negotiate better outcomes time and again, and will do so in the next parliament.”^[xviii] In August 2010, with the election result still up in the air, Brown left open the possibility of the Greens taking cabinet positions in a government led by either of the major parties.

In the event the Greens committed to three years of “responsible” government and stability at all costs.[xix] But there are very serious political problems with this commitment to “stability”. The editorial in the 23 August Australian Financial Review gave the game away: “Regardless of whether the Coalition’s Tony Abbott or Labor’s Julia Gillard leads it, this is the worst possible outcome for stable government and the unpopular economic reforms required to reinforce the Australian economy against another global recession, the expiry of the resources boom and the challenges of an ageing population.”^[xx] For the bosses, a stable government is one that can get this job done. But insofar as instability makes it harder for the government to push through these unpopular policies, that is a good thing for workers. So the Greens’ unquestioning commitment to stable government made it virtually inevitable, especially in the context of Labor’s right wing agenda, that they would become enforcers for the ruling class assault on the living standards of workers and the poor. While there were plenty of reasons, dating back some years, to be circumspect about the role the Greens would play once they entered into what was effectively a coalition government with Labor, many threw caution to the winds:

The strong showing for the Greens will exert new pressures on them too. On one hand, there will be mounting demands on them from the corporate media and big business to conform to the rules of shallow electoral politics. But an opposing pressure will come from people who voted Greens in record numbers precisely because the party challenged the neoliberal policies of Labor and the Coalition from the left.^[xxi]

But far from there being two equal pressures on the Greens, previous experience of the Greens’ electoral success had already shown how little weight the wishes of those who vote for them carry. In Tasmania, the Greens entered a coalition with the Liberals in 1989 which carried out savage public sector cuts. The April 2010 Tasmanian election saw Greens leader Nick McKim accept a ministerial portfolio, and Greens member for Denison, Cassy O’Connor, become a cabinet secretary and later a minister in a Greens-Labor coalition government.^[xxii] By 2012, this government was implementing spending cuts of 10 percent that meant the loss of 1,700 public sector jobs, increased water costs and public housing rents and $190 million cut from public education. As the government announced in October 2011 that it would cut elective surgery by $58 million, the Greens explicitly put themselves on the side of those implementing the vicious priorities of the system, and against those fighting them. Union meetings across Tasmania voted no confidence in Labor health minister Michelle O’Byrne and called for the cuts to be reversed.^[xxiii] Cassy O’Connor was booed, along with O’Byrne, when she spoke at a rally of mental health workers. She tried to distance the Greens from the budget, but went on to defend O’Byrne: “She has courage and she’s telling the truth.”^[xxiv] When Greens leader Nick McKim stood down 56 guards at Risdon Prison without pay and brought in the cops to crush industrial action, he acted no differently from his Labor or Liberal counterparts.^[xxv] On the day of the 2011 Tasmanian budget McKim declared:

Just as the Greens supported previous Labor and Liberal minority governments when tough remedial budget action was required, we have rolled up our sleeves to take on a similar responsible role once again… The Greens welcome the move to a new fiscal strategy.^[xxvi]

As Matthew Holloway, writing in Eureka Street, summed up the experience, “The Greens are often accused of being radicals and socialists. But the example given by Nick McKim in Tasmania shows that in power they will keep the good ship capitalism still steaming ahead.”^[xxvii] At the federal level, effectively in coalition with Labor, Bob Brown made it clear he thought it would be irresponsible to demand that “unfunded” policies be implemented. In his Budget reply speech on 12 May 2011 he argued:

This is not a Greens budget; it is a Labor budget. The Greens will deal responsibly with all budget legislation on its merits. We will not block the budget or supply, but we will look to improve it where we can in a fiscally responsible manner. However, in order to ensure stability in government, the Greens will not be supporting any opposition move which aims to wreck the budget.^[xxviii]

Fiscal responsibility is code for a commitment to austerity measures when the capitalist class demands them. Alongside this willingness to take on governmental roles and the anti-working class priorities that come with them has been a series of internal battles in the Greens, all of them won by the right led by Bob Brown. Brown used his personal authority to attack the more left wing NSW branch, and when they came under intensified assault by the Murdoch press for their support for boycotting Israel, Brown was happy to join in. In December 2010 Greens councillors had moved a successful motion in Sydney’s Marrickville Council to support the pro-Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign. Although BDS was NSW Greens policy, Bob Brown distanced himself and the Greens from the Marrickville councillors. In a humiliating backdown, two Greens councillors reversed their position, voting against Greens Mayor Fiona Byrne to rescind support for BDS.^[xxix] The outcome is not accidental. The more the Greens have electoral success, the more likely they are to bend to conservative pressure on “controversial” positions.

Brown made it clear that he did not want the Greens to be simply another minor party like the Democrats. Instead of the Democrats’ stance of “keeping the bastards honest” the Greens would “replace the bastards”. Prior to the 2010 election Guy Pearse, a Greens member (formerly a Liberal) and commentator spelt out how the Greens’ version of “replacing the bastards” works:

Ultimately, this minor party can’t threaten the dominance of the major parties without becoming a major party itself… Some are reluctant to consider going into government, knowing the only realistic medium-term scenario involves forming a coalition with one of the two major parties. They dread the compromise involved…these tensions are being resolved organically; most people walking through the door of the fastest growing political party in the country are political orphans from one or other major party, and they’re uninterested in a place on the fringe.^[xxx]

For all the Greens’ focus on parliamentary manoeuvring they don’t actually have the balance of power on critical issues. For example, while the Greens have been able to voice criticism of Labor’s continued backing for the war in Afghanistan by getting a parliamentary debate on the issue, there is no chance of a parliamentary vote forcing Australia out of Afghanistan with the Liberals backing Labor. The only way any government would be forced to withdraw at a time not of its choosing is by a mass campaign involving street protests and strikes.

One important difference between the Greens and the independents is that the Greens do have thousands of members outside parliament. But far from their electoral successes galvanising that base into extra-parliamentary action, for example to build an anti-war movement, the opposite has been the case – with one notable exception. The campaign the Greens have mobilised their activist base around since the election has been the government’s most unpopular policy – the carbon tax. Almost as soon as parliament resumed in October 2010, the Greens put aside their policies like an end to coal-fired power stations and devoted their energies to “winning” a price on carbon. They mobilised to back up the climate NGOs’ “Say Yes!” campaign that promoted the tax. Julia Gillard’s sales pitch, calling the tax “the most important economic reform in decades”, is only the echo of Bob Brown’s proud boast that the carbon tax is one of the Greens’ major achievements.^[xxxi] So their great achievement is to push through a neo-liberal tax that disproportionately hits workers by forcing up the price of basic necessities like electricity, delivers huge subsidies to polluting companies and will do little, if anything, to deal with climate change.

The fact that the Greens have tied themselves to an increasingly unpopular Labor government means they cannot build support among workers and students fed up with Labor’s right wing agenda. In the Victorian and NSW elections held at the end of 2010 and the start of 2011 the Greens polled well below expectations. In the Queensland election, after a year of promoting the carbon tax, their vote fell.^[xxxii] The Greens have increasingly made themselves part of the establishment and their progressive rhetoric is not backed up by any clear commitment to the needs and interests of workers.^[xxxiii] They gave an open guarantee to pass Labor’s budgets, with no proviso to reject cuts to government services or attacks on living standards. This just legitimises the austerity agenda Gillard is implementing. It helps push the political climate further to the right and strengthen the hand of the Liberals. The longer this goes on, the more the fate of the Greens is bound up with that of the Gillard government and the more certain an Abbott-led Coalition government becomes.

There is no sign that the Greens leadership has any intention of pulling back from this course. Any idea that Bob Brown stepping down from the leadership might open up more space for the left of the Greens was decisively refuted by the appointment of businessman Peter Whish-Wilson as his replacement in the Senate. Whish-Wilson, a former vice-president at the New York head office of failed investment bank Merrill Lynch, and who also worked as an investment banker for Deutsche Bank, made his pro-business stance amply clear:

A lot of the issues tend to be perceived as being conflict between companies and development and conservation, but obviously it’s more complicated than that. I’ve got experience in how corporations work. I believe that it’s time to start putting all the divisiveness aside.[xxxiv]

And unfortunately the left in the Greens that has consistently given way to Brown in recent years shows no sign of taking a firmer line under new leader Christine Milne. Lee Rhiannon, the most high profile left wing Green, enthused about the Greens’ very own investment banker Whish-Wilson, stating that “When you come to talk about dark greens, light greens etc and about division, again it’s shown to be wide of the mark… I very much welcome Peter. We’ll be working together in a collaborative way on a whole range of projects.”[xxxv]

The independents

The unrealistically optimistic gloss put on the 2010 election outcome in part reflected widely-held ideas on the left about the role of independents. The independents were held up as positive simply because they were independent, regardless of what they might actually stand for. Rather than the prospect of conservative MPs holding the balance of power being a cause for concern, there were many voices praising the prospects for a new era of democracy, courtesy of those same independents. Adam Bandt voiced this sentiment on Lateline immediately after the election, explaining the result as a desire “to hear the voices of third parties and independents more.”^[xxxvi] The determination to paint the situation in a positive light led to absurd assessments. “While they have been described by the media as conservative independents, on a raft of issues they are more progressive than either of the major parties,” commented Green Left Weekly’s Graham Matthews. He even went on to apply this analysis to that most obvious right-winger Bob Katter, writing of him at length:

Katter left the Nationals…due to his disenchantment with economic rationality. Katter opposed the sale of Telstra… He opposed the sale of Medibank Private in 2006, lamenting the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank, Qantas and other state assets…he has spoken publicly against the Northern Territory intervention. The strongest link between the three independents is their rejection of the Nationals, their former party. Styling themselves as defenders of the interests of farmers, small business and workers in the country, they oppose what they see as the destruction of services and the threat of deregulation and globalisation.^[xxxvii]

However Katter’s opposition to elements of neoliberalism is nothing new for far-right populist politicians. Pauline Hanson similarly opposed privatisation and economic rationalism and supported tariff protection. Fascist parties often campaign against big business and the banks. In April 2012 the Dutch far right Freedom Party refused to vote for budget cuts, bringing down the Dutch minority government, and at the same time the fascists in Greece campaigned in the election against the EU- imposed austerity measures.

There can be no doubt that Katter is a reactionary. When a member of the Queensland parliament he was a fervent supporter of the rabidly right wing premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Katter opposed the Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act which decriminalised homosexuality in Tasmania. In 1996, Katter supported his National Party colleague Bob Burgess’s comments which described Australian citizenship ceremonies as “dewogging”. Katter described critics of Burgess as “little slanty-eyed ideologues who persecute ordinary average Australians”.[xxxviii] The response to Katter indicates how truly bizarre is the idea that there is something virtuous about being “independent”, “non-conventional” or “minor”.

The other independents have not much more to recommend them. Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott are both ex-Nationals, well to the right of Labor. And even small-l liberal Andrew Wilkie, who poses as being progressive, stated that he was open to giving power to the Liberals. Yet Graham Matthews was quite willing to go to bat for them as well, drawing the conclusion that “On a wide range of issues, from climate change, to Indigenous rights, to economic policy, they are objectively to the left of both major parties.”^[xxxix]

The illusions in the independents rested on the assumption that undermining the two party system is necessarily a gain for the left. But there is nothing progressive about replacing a non-choice between the right wing politics of both Labor and Liberal with a hung parliament reliant on a small number of right wing independents. The fact that the independents held the balance of power didn’t signify “a break with the two-party system”. It just meant that the election was close. At best, the independents could do what the Greens have often done over the years – move short-lived private members’ bills, speak against government bills, or instigate and participate in parliamentary inquiries that are ignored. Adam Bandt told the Sunday Age that an increased role for private members’ bills “will mean I could move legislation on areas important to me – like tackling climate change, ending mandatory detention and removing discrimination against same-sex marriage – and it would have to actually be dealt with”. For two hours, perhaps. Bandt and independent MP Rob Oakeshott did speak against the people smuggling bill in November 2010, and Bandt, Wilkie, Oakeshott and Katter all opposed Labor’s National Radioactive Waste Management Bill, but with the Coalition voting for it, they made no difference.

There is nothing innately more left wing about private members’ business. Even if accountability and transparency were to appear in some unexplained way out of minority government, this misses the point. The key problem with the policies of Howard, Rudd and Gillard has not been their lack of transparency but their right wing content. Guy Rundle’s claim that negotiation with the independents to form the Gillard minority government “has done more to make visible the invisible structures of power…than a hundred civics lessons”^[xl] is nonsense. On the contrary, the “invisible structures of power” made themselves visible in the anti-working class policies that the new government continued to dish out. Independent MPs have had procedural reforms introduced before. Independents controlled the balance of power in the NSW parliament between 1991 and 1995, during which they negotiated changed parliamentary procedures and introduced a bigger role for private members. None of these prevented the relentless imposition of neoliberal policies.

The failure of the unions

The great tragedy is that the union movement has not acted as a left alternative to Gillard. The trade unions have done next to nothing to fight for jobs and conditions, more public spending, or to reverse anti-union laws. Instead the unions have, in the main, accommodated to and apologised for the Gillard government while it has attacked their members. This fawning reached its symbolic height when Gillard was given a standing ovation on the first day of the 2012 ACTU Congress.

A look through the last two years of ACTU media releases reveals, at most, polite expressions of concern about aspects of government policy. The only signs of life are directed at the Coalition – all the better to justify going along with Labor’s right wing approach. For example, after the defeat of Rudd’s leadership challenge to Gillard, the ACTU issued the following press release:

The leadership of the Federal Labor Party has now been settled, and the Government must urgently focus on an agenda to improve the lives of all Australians, united against the real threat to workers’ rights and the economy of a Tony Abbott government… ACTU Secretary Jeff Lawrence said the Labor Government had achieved much.^[xli]

After government intervention forced the Qantas dispute into Fair Work Australia (FWA) – which promptly did exactly what the company wanted by cancelling the unions’ industrial action – the ACTU had nothing but praise for both government and FWA as union members were disarmed.^[xlii] And far from defending the right to strike, when the government came under attack by the bosses for the level of industrial disputes still occurring, the ACTU’s response was a strident defence of how inactive the union movement was – “Industrial disputes continue to fall under Fair Work Act, proving employer groups wrong”.^[xliii] Disastrously the ACTU has backed the anti-worker carbon tax. This has created the ludicrous situation where Tony Abbott can pose as a friend of the workers, defending them from taxes that will undermine living standards. The ACTU has played a starring role in selling the tax to union members, proclaiming, for example, that “Claims the ACTU believes workers will be worse off under a price on carbon are wrong.”^[xliv]

This abject failure of the ACTU to stand up to Labor’s right wing policies can only give the bosses greater confidence to back Abbott’s hard right agenda and go further on the offensive if the economy turns down. Already we have seen straws in the wind at a state level with new Liberal governments in Victoria, NSW and Queensland launching austerity drives, and yet again the union response has, with few exceptions, been pathetic.

Conclusion

The Gillard government has been a government for the big end of town and a disaster for workers and the oppressed. It has determinedly continued with the neoliberal agenda of the previous Howard and Hawke/Keating governments. The Greens have not provided a left wing alternative to Labor’s anti-working class policies. Quite the reverse. They have propped up this reactionary government and given a blank cheque to Labor’s austerity budgets.

Free of any serious restraints, the Labor government, by demoralising its working class supporters, is relentlessly laying the basis for a vicious Abbott-led Coalition government ready and more than willing to impose savage austerity if, or more likely when, the cold winds of the crisis sweeping the globe hit Australia. In a situation like the present, when official politics is dominated by an appalling right wing consensus between Labor and the Coalition, what is needed is a clearly left wing political force committed to standing up for workers and the oppressed, that champions rebellion, fights for a class struggle strategy in the unions and encourages militant resistance against right wing policies, whoever is promoting them.