Many working people welcomed the dumping of the conservative government of Liberal premier Richard Court in the state of Western Australia February 10 in favor of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). This mood gathered steam February 17 as vote totals in Queensland gave the incumbent ALP government of Premier Peter Beattie the largest parliamentary majority in the party's history. Commentators in the big-business media had said the elections were too close to call.

Mark Davidson, a wharfie [dockworker] at Patrick Stevedores here, commented, "It seems more and more people are seeing that the Liberal Party is a big-business party."

Three major parties dominate in Australian state and federal politics: the ALP, the Liberal Party, and the National Party. The ALP, a social democratic party linked to the unions, is the country's oldest, and receives the largest plurality of votes nationally.

The Liberal Party is the dominant conservative big-business party and has been in a half-century partnership called the Coalition with the smaller conservative party, the National Party. The Nationals' support comes mainly from rural and regional areas outside the main cities. The Coalition parties have formed the federal government since the 1996 election, with Liberal Party leader John Howard as prime minister. The deputy prime minister is National Party leader John Anderson.

A number of smaller capitalist parties, single-issue groupings, and other parties contest elections. These include the Greens and the Australian Democrats. The Democrats currently hold the balance of power in the federal Senate, thus having deciding votes on legislation. Pauline Hanson's ultrarightist One Nation party burst onto the scene following the 1996 election when she won a seat in the federal House of Representatives.

Volatility in capitalist politics is sharpening, arising from a continuing process of social polarization. Longtime National Party voters mainly defected to One Nation, whose candidates won seats in both Western Australia and Queensland, while many Liberals voted Labor for the first time ever.

Popular anger and discontent have risen around the country in the wake of the imposition of a 10 percent federal goods and services tax that took effect in July 2000 with an onerous quarterly reporting requirement for small businesses, as well as rising petrol and diesel prices, continued moves to privatize telephone services, cuts to government and other services, and the Howard government's refusal to acknowledge Aboriginal rights. In some cases, the anger has spilled over into protests. Truckers briefly blockaded fuel depots in Victoria and Queensland last year to protest fuel price hikes. Hundreds of thousands turned out for "walks" for "reconciliation" with Aborigines aimed implicitly at the Howard government.

For working people, there have been attacks on union rights and conditions, increasing speedup, and the growth of casual and part-time jobs at the expense of "permanent" jobs with a modicum of security. Those who have jobs are working harder and longer hours. The stalling world economy has added to falling prices for agricultural and mining commodities. And the unemployment rate has been creeping up again since October 2000. Recent announcements of sharp losses in profits, for example, by Qantas airlines, will mean further job losses. Strikes and actions by coal miners, iron ore miners, steelworkers, textile workers, dairy farmers, and others have taken place.  
 
Conservatives routed
In the February elections, the number of Liberal and National party MPs was sharply reduced in both Queensland and Western Australia. Most big-business commentators described the outcomes as a "rout" with devastating implications for the ability of the Howard government to win a third three-year term when it must go to the polls late this year.

Most elections here over the past two decades have been decided not by a candidate receiving a majority but through the system of preferential voting, where voters number candidates in order of preference. Ballots cast without all candidates marked are invalid.

When the votes are counted, candidates with the fewest first-preference votes are eliminated. Those votes are then distributed to the remaining candidates, based on the preferences indicated by the voter, until a winner is established. This trend continued this year, with the ALP winning a majority of seats in each state only after the rounds of preference votes were tabulated. The Labor victories come in the wake of crushing ALP wins over the Coalition in Victoria and New South Wales (NSW) in 1999. Tasmania also has a Labor government.  
 
One Nation
In the 1998 Queensland election, 11 One Nation state MPs were elected and in the 1998 federal election they won one Senate seat. The ruling class then went after the rightist outfit, using electoral laws to impose massive fines and deregistration, accompanied by a media barrage. These pressures, the heterogeneous nature of the ultraright current, Hanson's "autocratic leadership," and internal wrangling led in 1999 to all the Queensland state MPs resigning from the party and either becoming independents or forming the rightist City Country Alliance. No MPs from this group were reelected February 17.

Hanson lost her federal seat in 1998 after its electoral boundaries were redrawn and no other party would give her their preference votes. Despite all this, and to the surprise of many, Hansonism has been resilient. One Nation vote percentages remained similar in these elections to what they were in 1998.

Journalist Anne Summers, writing in the February 15 Sydney Morning Herald, noted, "Despite losing her seat, losing her party, being deserted by her elected members in Queensland and NSW, and being forced to scramble for funds to avoid bankruptcy, she is still there as a political force because there is still a constituency for her primary call to arms."

Demagogically calling for One Nation to be given a "fair go" against the "big boys" of the major parties, Hanson campaigned on now-familiar scapegoating and racist themes. She demanded a stop to all immigration, forcing refugees to return home, and for "young Australians" to be given job training over immigrants. Hanson also called for ending all native title deeds and funding to Aborigines. She claimed that calls for a government apology over the "stolen generations," when for decades Aboriginal children were forcibly and systematically removed from their families by authorities, was only for monetary compensation.

The radical, rightist proposals also included cheap credit for small business and scrapping land-clearing controls. Hanson also advocated lowering education qualifications in police recruitment and called for punishing rather than "rehabilitating" prisoners. Hanson raised the One Nation refrains for a referendum on capital punishment and relaxation of recent gun-control laws.

One Nation's "call to arms" is aimed at small businesspeople and working people in rural, regional, and working-class areas hit hardest by the crisis. In rural areas Hanson taps into the resentment against the Coalition, with its policy of milk and dairy wholesale price deregulation and tax increases on diesel fuel. These policies, along with increased competition and falling commodity prices on world markets, are driving many family farmers off their land.

The Australian rulers are alarmed at the conservatives' defeats. Well-known conservative Robert Manne wrote February 19, "The unanticipated West Australian election results and the truly astonishing results in Queensland confirm something that has been obvious since the defeat of the [Liberal] Kennett Government [in Victoria] in 1999. In contemporary Australia, the conservative side of politics is in a condition of crisis, from which it is difficult to imagine its recovery, at least in the short term....

"The National Party is involved in a mortal struggle with One Nation over which is to prevail among the rural battlers," he continued. "The decision of the National Party to deal with One Nation may create a crisis in its relations with the Liberal Party if the Howard leadership holds firm. Alternatively, if Howard relents, the issue may create a crisis within the Liberal Party."

Under increasing strain, the National Party itself is fracturing. In South Australia, the NP state organization announced February 23 it is splitting from the federal party. And Ronald Boswell, the party's leader in the federal Senate and a vocal critic of Hanson, has been publicly warned by other Nationals to back off his attacks or face losing party endorsement for his candidacy at the next election.

A continuation of these trends will mean the defeat of the Coalition by the ALP in federal elections later this year, a prospect working people are already anticipating.

Ron Poulsen and Doug Cooper are members of the Maritime Union of Australia.  
 
 
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