A balance sheet on the ALP government
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has repeatedly promised to lead an “unashamedly pro-business, but also unashamedly pro-worker” Labor government. In his election night speech last May, he pledged: “Together, we can work in common interests with business and unions to drive productivity, lift wages and profits”.
Eight months into this government, we can say that Albanese has kept half of his promises: all those that were about being pro-business and boosting profits. But on every important question facing the working class, this government has been utterly hostile.
Real wages continue to fall at record levels as the cost of living rises. Inflation is running at 7.8 percent, while average wage growth is only 3.1 percent. The government has made clear that it does not want wage rises to keep up with inflation, Treasurer Jim Chalmers declaring, “We don’t believe that there should be an automatic, mechanical minimum wage rise on every occasion that perfectly matches the headline inflation rate”.
In the lead-up to October’s budget, Chalmers told workers struggling to pay the bills, “Don’t expect cheques in the mail”, and instead promised years of falling wages and rising unemployment. Meanwhile, his government has raised taxes on workers earning less than $90,000 by scrapping the low- and middle-income tax offset.
On election night, Albanese teared up about his own upbringing, saying: “I hope there are families in public housing watching this tonight. Because I want every parent to be able to tell their child, no matter where you live or where you come from, in Australia the doors of opportunity are open to us all”. But under his government, doors are closing in the faces of people who can’t find or afford a house to live in.
A huge rental crisis is gripping the country, with rents up 18.6 percent in Sydney and 20 percent in Melbourne in the last year. Mortgage repayments are rising dramatically for homeowners, while the major banks are making massive profits from $2 trillion in household debt. Public and so-called social housing spending (when governments form partnerships with private developers) is abysmally low, and the Albanese government’s announcements to build 20-30,000 new affordable dwellings will not even scratch the surface.
On election night, Albanese proclaimed: “Together, we can strengthen universal health care through Medicare”. Instead, he is presiding over the worst crisis of bulk billing in more than a decade: 57 percent of Australians are paying a minimum average of $40 per doctor’s visit, according to a report by Cleanbill, a website that helps people find more affordable health practitioners. This in turn is putting even more pressure on the chronically underfunded hospital system, for which the Labor government outrageously cut funding by $2.4 billion over the next four years in its October budget.
It’s a very different story for the rich. Oxfam reports that, from March 2020 to November 2022, the number of billionaires in Australia rose by 11, to 42, their collective wealth increasing by 61 percent. Since November, three more billionaires have been added. This bonanza for billionaires explains why the ruling class has largely backed the ALP government so far, ensuring it extended favourable media coverage and popularity. Labor has also offered the capitalists something that the Liberals couldn’t—a progressive gloss on their regime of class war and widening inequality.
Unlike the Liberals, with their divisive culture wars and mean rhetoric, Labor speaks of inclusivity, and of building “an economy that works for people, and not the other way around”. Take the issue of climate change. Labor has supposedly “ended the climate wars”. In reality, it has adopted the Business Council of Australia’s climate policy. This includes a so-called safeguard mechanism for industry, which will allow companies actually to increase their total carbon emissions while pretending that they are becoming greener through greater efficiencies and, especially, buying sham carbon offsets that represent no real decrease in emissions. The government will even foot the bill for the latter, to the tune of $600 million.
On top of this, Labor is allowing the non-stop expansion of the fossil fuel industry. If all of the country’s 114 planned coal mines and gas extraction facilities are approved, the combined carbon emissions from them will be nearly 67 times greater than the 180 megatonnes of carbon dioxide to be cut from power generation by 2030. What does “ending the climate wars” mean, then? For Labor, it means trying to cover up Australian capitalism’s climate crimes, not through old-school climate denialism, but through industrial-scale greenwashing, clever accounting and, where possible, the incorporation of climate NGOs and the Greens, who have put up very little opposition to Labor’s agenda. This is the “modern” approach to getting away with climate murder, and brings Australia into line with Joe Biden’s America, the UK and most of Europe.
We see a similar approach with Labor’s support for an Indigenous Voice to parliament. The Albanese government is not taking any genuine steps to address the appalling racist inequalities faced by Aboriginal people, including mass incarceration, racist policing and a massive gap in socioeconomic and health standards. As Jordan Humphreys has written in Red Flag, “the Voice is an almost entirely symbolic gesture. The proposed model of the Voice will be an advisory body only, with no actual power over government policy”.
Internationally, the Labor government is rapidly expanding Australia’s military and striving to ensure the ongoing predominance of US imperialism in Asia. Its recent rhetorical de-escalation in the war of words with China—prompted by the desire to shore up profitable export markets for as long as possible—does not translate into any de-escalation in the ALP’s actual preparation for war. Albanese has reaffirmed Scott Morrison’s signing of the AUKUS treaty with the US and the UK, and the hundreds of billions of dollars devoted to obtaining nuclear submarines.
In a speech to a business summit, Albanese said he wanted to revive the “spirit of consensus that former Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke used to bring together governments, trade unions, businesses and civil society around their shared aims of growth and job creation”. Bob Hawke was Labor prime minister from 1983 to 1991, and this is a fitting comparison in all the worst ways.
Hawke’s government is viewed very favourably by the ruling class because it presided over the introduction of a host of policies to boost profits at the expense of the working class, including privatisations, deregulation of the financial system, wage restraint and clamping down on strikes, including government strikebreaking. The Hawke years resulted in a big redistribution of national income from wages to profits, not surpassed until today. Tragically, Hawke was able to carry out these attacks with little opposition, as he coopted the leading officials of the trade union movement, in a way the Liberals never could.
The Australian Labor Party has always put the interests of the capitalist class ahead of workers, the poor and the oppressed, while trying to cover up this agenda with talk of our supposed “common” or “national” interests. We have no common interests with the billionaires who exploit and oppress. Our goal must be to build a fight back against them wherever possible, on the streets and in the workplaces, and to build a socialist party that can lead this struggle.
