Vice-presidential candidate Margaret Trowe and Jacob Perasso, the Socialist Workers candidate for U.S. Senate in New York, brought their fighting working-class and internationalist perspectives to many more people through a number of interviews in the local media. Two youth participated in the campaign activities and decided to join the Young Socialists during the tour. Tom Leonard, a retired seaman and veteran socialist, accompanied Trowe and Perasso on their visit and presented several classes in the days following Trowe and Perasso's departure.

Some people at these discussions expressed surprise that someone so young was standing against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in New York. Perasso, 24, is a leader of the Young Socialists and a packinghouse worker. Trowe, a meat packer from Austin, Minnesota, said she found an immediate interest from workers here, both because of the common conditions they face as a result of the employers' offensive and the renewed resistance to these assaults on the working class and the unions.  
 
Aboriginal Tent Embassy
The socialist candidates were warmly received August 23 at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy where they held a discussion over coffee with indigenous activists. Trevor Close, an Aboriginal man, explained how they had set up the scores of tents in Victoria Park adjacent to Sydney University.

Close said that Aboriginal rights protests were planned, including a September 15 march on the Olympic Stadium in Sydney, just before the games begin. "Aboriginal people are tired of being pushed around. This is our land," he said. "That is what the Tent Embassy is about. We want the war [against Aborigines] to stop, and the government to sign a treaty and to recognize our sovereignty. We're doing this for indigenous people all over the world." Trowe added, "and for workers and farmers." Close said, "and for refugees."

Trowe said that a "land reform is needed to guarantee land rights to Aboriginal people and to guarantee to working farmers the right to farm their land without fear of foreclosure." We also need to transform relations in the factories and mines, she said, "to guarantee workers keep their lives and limbs." Trowe explained the efforts of her campaign to build an alliance between workers and farmers, as part of the revolutionary struggle to establish a workers and farmers government in the United States.

Over dinner that evening at a supporter's house, the candidates and campaign supporters talked with young people interested in revolutionary politics. In answer to a question by Greg, a university student, Trowe said the socialists are "standing in the elections to explain how we can win. That is, how to build a working-class leadership capable of leading a massive movement of workers and farmers that can win because it is prepared and determined to fight for governmental power and wants to learn from history's defeats and victories in order to accomplish that goal."

Trowe also talked about the bipartisan moves led by the Clinton administration to bolster U.S. military might, the most important weapon in the hands of the imperialists both at home and abroad. Trowe pointed to the antimissile system targeting China, Russia, and other workers states that Washington is driving to set up, and the North American Military Command, which "in practice, will be used against urban insurrections and working people at home."

The next day Trowe and Perasso drove a couple of hours to the South Coast, an industrial and mining region south of Sydney. The two candidates gave an interview to reporters from the Illawarra Mercury before bringing their campaign to students at Wollongong University. Then after a further hour's drive to Moss Vale, Perasso and Trowe were welcomed to the picket line at Joy Mining Machinery by David Turner, the chief shop steward for the locked-out unionists. (See article on union fight on page 15). They spoke to the embattled workers in front of a journalist from the Southern Highland News and a reporter from WIN TV, based in Wollongong. The two papers ran stories on the visit by the two Socialist Workers candidates.

Perasso was asked why he and Trowe would come to this industrial dispute in a small town halfway round the globe. "Our campaign points to fights like yours as the most important thing going on in the world," Perasso said to a group of workers on the picket line, "where the most important thinking is going on about what we need to do to change society."

Rod Duff, a 33-year-old boilermaker and quality controller, explained the workers' fight against the union-busting lockout by Joy Mining Machinery. "All we want is to keep what we've got. The company wants to take us back 20 years. They're up to the stage of trying to sue us individually for loss of profits, and they locked us out." Lee Carey, a welder of similar age, and afternoon shift charge hand, laughed. "We've got no intention of losing. We're waiting to be sued. They can have half of what I've got. Half of nothing is nothing!"

Duff stated that he thought he and the other workers at the company did "pretty high-quality work, not making farm gates" and should be paid well for it. Trowe raised that the bosses up the gap between high- and low-paying jobs as a means to divide working people and perpetuate their social system, which is based on exploitation and oppression. "Every worker, whether making farm gates or sophisticated machinery, 'skilled' or 'unskilled' needs a decent wage," Trowe said. Duff agreed. There was also a murmur of assent from the listening workers as Trowe pointed out the desperate situation of many dairy farmers, both in Australia and the United States, who face losing their land and livelihoods. The socialist candidate explained that neither workers nor farmers, but "only the capitalists were profiting from high prices."

At an informal discussion with some wharfies on August 25, Paul, a newer worker, told the visiting socialists that "from the moment this government came in, they've been on a vendetta against union rights and conditions." He expressed his view that labor laws were needed to force companies to provide safer places of work. Trowe agreed, pointing out that behind the speedup, intensification of labor, and setting aside of safety procedures, is the profit drive by the bosses. "Safety is a crucial question for the labor movement, not only on the job but for society as a whole," Trowe said. It takes conscious, united action of workers and our unions to demand safe working conditions, production of safe goods, and protection of the environment, Trowe said.

That evening 18 people attended a public meeting to hear the Socialist Workers candidates at the Communist League premises in Redfern. The resistance by workers and farmers fighting for dignity, unions, health and safety, and against racism and police brutality, and in defense of immigrant rights, Trowe said, is the leading edge of what will become "a powerful social movement of millions that can take power, establish a workers and farmers government, and begin the construction of a society by and for the immense majority of humanity."

Nick Rawson, a young carpenter active in the Australia-Cuba Friendship Society, asked if the candidates weren't overly optimistic, since from his experience on the job, workers had a wide range of consciousness about union and political questions, and were still quite divided. Perasso welcomed the question, since it posed "what can change people from the dog-eat-dog competitiveness bred by capitalism" towards an understanding "that only social, not individual, solutions will address the effects of the growing crisis of capitalism."

Perasso pointed to the growth of union resistance and other struggles as providing the answer to how people change through the experience of collective struggle. He said that the Joy picket line he had participated in was similar to many he had joined in the United States, in which the question of human dignity was a central question.

On August 26, the Socialist Workers candidates joined an 800-strong protest against government attacks on the rights of refugees. They marched on the Villawood Detention Centre.

Trowe was interviewed by Australian Associated Press, a wire service, by phone before her arrival, and Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) Radio, a government multicultural station, on August 23. Both candidates were also interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Commission's (ABC) Canberra radio station 666 and by John Highfield on ABC radio's The World Today program.

As Trowe told the Illawarra Mercury, "The brutal drive of the capitalists for profit is producing something in addition to profit. It is producing the gravediggers of capitalism, right there in the plants, in the mills, in the mines and in the streets and cities across the United States." Their experience showed that this is extending across the world.

Ron Poulsen is a member of the Maritime Union of Australia.