Socialist Voice

 By Roger Annis

Melbourne, Australia—Heading into Australia’s national election on November 24, Prime Minister John Howard is in trouble. Polls show that a majority of voters see the election as an opportunity to rid the country of his hated, right wing government. If it goes down to defeat, it will be in no small part thanks to determined struggles that working people have waged against it.

Howard is seeking a fourth term since coming to office in 1996. His Liberal Party governs in a coalition with the smaller National Party. He has ruled ruthlessly on behalf of Australia’s wealthy.

For most of the Howard years, Australia’s capitalists have been riding a resource-driven profit boom. The value of coal exports, for example, has risen from $13 billion in 2001 to $25 billion today. But these years have been marked by deep and sustained attacks on the rights and living conditions of working people. Wages have declined for many, especially young people. There have been sharp declines in social services, the environment, and democratic rights.

Military spending has increased sharply. The government is an enthusiastic ally of the U.S.-led “war on terrorism.” Australia has 4,000 troops abroad, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. It plays the leading role in United Nations-sponsored police operations in East Timor and Solomon Islands. New laws allow the government to trample on democratic rights in the name of “fighting terrorism.”

Disaster for Aboriginals

Howard’s term has been a disaster for Australia’s indigenous peoples. They number 470,000. Unemployment, at 20%, is three times the national average. Life expectancy is unchanged from 100 years ago—56 years for men and 63 for women, approximately 20 years less than the national average. Aboriginals make up 2.5% of the population, but 21% of the prison population. Only 39% of children finish high school.

Aboriginal lands are subject to constant desecration and destruction by massive resource extraction projects, the most recent of which is the proposed Hope Downs iron ore mine in the state of Western Australia.

Howard made a pre-election death bed conversion to indigenous rights on October 11 when he called for “reconciliation.” If re-elected, he would hold a referendum that would place a token clause in the Australian constitution recognizing the Aboriginal population. The measure would give no new rights or compensation to the victims of past racist policies. Compensation for the “Stolen Generations”—the victims of a policy of cultural genocide that saw police and social welfare agencies workers remove children from their parents and communities—is a key demand of indigenous peoples.

Just three months before his conversion, Howard ordered an extraordinary police and military intervention into indigenous communities in the country’s Northern Territory on the pretext of combating abuse of children and other social ills.

Workers’ rights under attack

Trade union membership in Australia has declined during the Howard years from 31% of the workforce in 1996 to 20% today. Special laws restrict the rights of union representation and organizing. The most notorious of these are Australian Workplace Agreements (AWA). These allow employers to coerce workers into opting out of collective bargaining and signing individual “agreements” with their employers. They are especially effective in taking workers out of unions when they change jobs.

In early 2006, Howard’s government adopted further draconian changes to labour law, called “Work Choices.” [1]  Among its provisions are:

• Increased restrictions on the right to strike, including prohibiting non-union workers in an enterprise from joining industrial action by union colleagues.
• A new government commission better able to limit future increases to the minimum wage.
• Further entrenchment of youth slave labour wages. The federal minimum wage is $13.74 ($12.61US); employers can pay less than half that to youth or “trainees.”
• Provisions that make it easier for employers of less than 100 employees to fire workers.
• More restrictions on the right of unions to recruit new members and bargain collective agreements.
• Provisions that further facilitate the imposition of AWAs.

The biggest attack on unions to date has been the Building Construction Industry Improvement Act, enacted in September 2005. It imposes sharp restrictions on union organizing and industrial action, and it imposes draconian penalties and gag restrictions on unions or workers who try to take action. Building industry police have special powers to ensure compliance with the act, including fining or jailing workers who do not cooperate with investigations.

A recent study of the first effects of Work Choices by the Workplace Research Center at Sydney University confirms that the program has led to a decline in wages and work conditions. The program is already widely unpopular, and it’s a big reason why Howard’s party trails the Labor Party opposition at the outset of the election. But the coalition government remains committed to its attacks on workers. Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey was asked by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Oct 18 what future role he sees for trade unions in Australia. He said, “Well, essentially, it is over.”

Outlook for Labor Party

The Australian Labor Party and its leader Kevin Rudd are riding high in polls at the outset of the election. Many workers and youth place high hopes in the party once installed in office.

Others are less than enthused. Rudd has said that his party will abolish AWAs, but not until the year 2012 at the earliest. It will keep other anti-union provisions of the Howard years. The Labor government in the state of Victoria is presently threatening 25,000 nurses there with fines, jailings and firings if they continue industrial action aimed at improving salaries and the quality of health care in the state. The nurses are also fighting to block the introduction of AWAs.

Labor Party Deputy Leader Julia Gillard explained the party’s trade union policy on Oct 18 when she told journalists that “workers will only be able under our system to take protected industrial action when bargaining for an enterprise agreement followed by a mandatory secret ballot.”

Industry-wide collective bargaining used to be common in Australia, as well as the right to strike during the life of a collective agreement. In 1983, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) signed a sweeping agreement with a newly-elected Labor government that committed unions to a “partnership” philosophy with the employers and the government. Industrial bargaining and many other trade union rights went into sharp decline during three Labor governments from 1983 to 1996. Real wages declined by 17% to 28 %, depending on industry. Union representation dropped from 51% of the workforce to 31%.

Rudd has committed to continuing Australia’s imperialist foreign policy. He summarized his views in a recent interview with the foreign editor of the daily The Australian. Australia’s armed forces, Rudd said, must be “capable of three tasks: one, the defence of Australia …two, the maintenance of Australian security across the wider air-sea gap; and three, we’re an ally of the U.S. and therefore we need a force structure capable of participation in common allied operations.”

Labor supports the Howard government decision to build new ships capable of transporting large numbers of Australian soldiers abroad. Rudd says he wants an end to the country’s “combat role” in Iraq and would move to a neighbouring country its training mission of Iraqi police and soldiers.

Fightback spirit growing

When Work Choices was announced in late 2004, most union leaders said “Don’t fight it, let’s wait and vote Labor into office.” But others went into action. Militant unions in the state of Victoria won a decision at the Victoria Trades Hall Council for a statewide stopwork and protest on June 30, 2005. Then the equivalent union federations in Western Australia and Queensland agreed to hold protests in their states. This pressured the ACTU into declaring a national day of protest, to which the remaining state union federations reluctantly agreed. Around 300,000 workers mobilized across the country on June 30 and July 1.

Sustained pressure and organizing by rank and file workers and militant unions produced more actions. On November 15, 2005, 600,000 people came out, including 250,000 who marched in the streets of Melbourne, state capital of Victoria and the country’s second-largest city. On June 28, 2006, approximately 200,000 joined protests across the country, as did 300,000 on November 30.

The protests in 2006 began to include illegal industrial action.

Some local victories against Work Choices have been scored through industrial action by determined unions, reversing firings, for example. Building trades and metal manufacturing workers in Victoria responded to attacks on their unions with a protest march of 20,000 in Melbourne on Sept 26.

Many trade union activists attended the recent Latin America and Asia Pacific International Solidarity Forum in Melbourne. One of the organizers of the Forum was Australia Asia Worker Links, an organization that promotes ties of solidarity between Australian workers and their counterparts in less developed countries of the region. Speakers at the Forum included leaders of revolutionary parties and mass social movements in the Asia Pacific region, spokespersons from revolutionary Venezuela, and trade union activists and leaders.

The forum was sponsored by and received support from more than a dozen trade unions in Australia. The international director of the ACTU, Alison Tate, chaired one of the Forum’s sessions, and opening greetings were delivered by Brian Boyd, Secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall Council (state federation of unions).

Fighting for a better world

Unions in Australia are a growing part of the youth and social movements that are fighting for alternative policies on all the big issues of the day. In Sydney on September 8, more than 10,000 people defied legal threats and draconian security measures to protest a high-profile meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Council (APEC). Two days earlier, the Resistance socialist youth group helped lead a walkout of 1,500 high school students in several cities in protest against APEC and the accompanying visit of U.S. president George Bush.

Australia’s environmental movement remains a force in politics. The Green Party received 842,000 votes, 7.2% of the total, in the 2004 election. Currently, there is a mass campaign to block a pulp mill in Tasmania, a large island state off Australia’s southern coast. Five thousand people mobilized against the mill on Oct 14. A “Walk Against Warming” is expected to draw hundreds of thousands across Australia on November 11.

Aboriginal activists are fighting. A new aboriginal rights organization, National Aboriginal Alliance, was formed in September to provide better coordination.

A socialist alternative in the Australian election

Responding to the new spirit of struggle marking the Howard years, a new political formation, the Socialist Alliance, was formed in 2001. It brought together socialists and other activists looking for an alternative to the pro-capitalist policies of the Labour Party. The Alliance is a registered party and is presenting 25 candidates for the parliament and senate. Dozens of union activists have joined in recent months and several trade unions are offering support. One of its affiliates and driving forces is the Democratic Socialist Perspective, a Marxist organization.

The Alliance is widely distributing three statements in the election—a Green Charter; a charter of workers rights entitled, “Working people in Australia need a party of our own”; and a “Gender Agenda” dedicated to women’s rights.

Alliance candidate and Aboriginal rights activist Sam Watson has summed up the stakes in the election with these words: “The alternative we need must put people and our planet before the profits of the giant corporations. It must enshrine the principles of democracy, solidarity and cooperation. It must learn from Indigenous tradition and respect and live in balance with the natural world.”

The Australian anti-union offensive should serve as a warning to workers in Canada and elsewhere—Australia’s is the program that bosses everywhere in the world would like to implement. We can learn much from the fightback of people there.

Notes:
[1] For a detailed examination of Work Choices, see the article in Links journal: Work Choices: A huge challenge for organized labour in Australia

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Roger Annis attended the Latin America and Asia Pacific International Solidarity Forum in Melbourne, October 11 to 14. More information on the Socialist Alliance can be found at www.socialist-alliance.org.

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