After over a year of relentless campaigning by the capitalist press, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan is history. Few on the left will mourn her passing. She implemented $2.4 billion in cuts to school funding and oversaw the degradation of schools and hospitals. She introduced harsh new sentencing laws, copied from the right-wing Queensland government, which meant children as young as 14 can now be sentenced to life in prison. She spent millions hosting an international arms fair during a genocide, and unleashed riot police and stun grenades on those who dissented. She continued the demolition of public housing and sell-offs of public land started by former premier Daniel Andrews, and when under pressure over budget deficits, continued the privatisation of VicRoads and planned to do the same to Melbourne Water.
Despite all this, the capitalist establishment wanted her brought down, and are gleefully celebrating her demise. The Murdoch press is known for its rabid hatred of Victorian Labor, and have made its predictable contribution. But it has been the Age newspaper, historically considered a liberal outlet, which led the ruthless campaign to destroy Allan. It ran more than 100 pieces on what they came to call “corruption” in the Big Build (a collection of infrastructure projects announced in 2015), a small proportion of which was real and much of which was simply an attack on effective trade unionism. This campaign continued despite it being clear that the narrative being spun was helping the far-right One Nation rise in the polls.
When the news broke that Allan was resigning, the editors celebrated with a front page spread and major feature on their website. The paper’s editorial rightly took credit, referencing the Age’s endless and highly partisan reporting on the Big Build. Not satisfied with bringing down an elected premier, they demanded that Allan’s replacement, Ben Carroll, express “contrition” for his predecessor’s sins.
The nature of those sins was made clear when Paul Sakkal, the Age’s chief political correspondent, defined “Victoria-style governance” (cue thunderous minor chords) as a government which “scorned business leaders, economists and the media” and cast them as “ideological enemies”. This is a reference to more than a decade of Labor governments in Victoria that, while far from left wing, have not fully embraced the interests and desires of big business. Key to the widespread capitalist hostility was Andrews’ close ties to the unions, particularly the CFMEU, and his stance in relation to the pandemic. The anti-vaxxer, death-desiring mobs that protested the lockdowns were backed by capitalists big and small, and have now congealed around Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.
Of course, Sakkal’s piece is not merely of historical interest. Rather, it presents Allan’s downfall as a fable whose lesson is that federal Labor must not implement the slightest measure that could cause the rich any discomfort. His focus here is on the minor tax tweaks proposed in the federal budget, which would ask investors to pay the same rates as wage earners (the horror!). This moderate half step back towards a fair tax system “showed signs that habits from Victoria might have spread north”, according to Sakkal. His proof? “Business groups protested for months”.
The irony, of course, is that the Andrews-Allan Labor government has been, until recently, the most popular state administration for decades. The fact that Andrews won ever greater support among working-class people for his public health measures, despite the backlash from businesses, stuck in the craw of the capitalist establishment. So too the mass support for Labor’s investment in public infrastructure, including the much-maligned Suburban Rail Loop. It is incredible that in the face of the campaign against it, only 37 percent of Victorians oppose the plan. The bosses and their media shills simply cannot understand why the majority of people value human life and social amenities more than profits. Nor can they accept that Victoria has in effect been a one-party state for nearly 28 years.
Carrol, Allan’s replacement, is a robotic right-wing ALP apparatchik from central casting, who has immediately set himself the task of winning back the support of the capitalists. His first announcement was to assuage them that his name was neither Jacinta Allan nor Daniel Andrews, a move which was applauded by the commentariat: “[Unlike Andrews and Allan] Carroll belongs to a tradition of Labor pragmatism. His persona is suburban: a Catholic, straight-laced family man with a lifetime love of the Kangaroos who got a taste for marathon running in middle age.”
This everyday suburbanite’s first new policy was to announce a sweeping royal commission into the construction sector, thereby meeting the key demand of the Age and other business advocates. This would allow developers to make even greater profits by cutting construction costs, and further discredit unionism more broadly. “Victoria’s economy is a partnership between business, government, and working people”, he intoned, before listing a series of changes that would exclusively benefit businesses, including the possibility of watering down the highly popular work from home laws. He also signalled his support for the Victoria Police by announcing that he will reopen closed stations, yet another concession to law-and-order campaigning from the right-wing media.
This rightward jag in the face of serious pressure from capital strongly echoes the shift in the Labor leadership from Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard while the party was in power federally in 2010. After intense campaigning from Australia’s richest people—including a protest of billionaires and their hangers-on in Perth—Labor ditched Rudd and installed his deputy. Like Carroll today, Gillard’s overwhelming goal was to appease the right. She weakened the highly popular mining tax and displayed even greater cruelty to refugees and asylum seekers. This capitulation in the face of capitalist campaigning did not help Labor in the slightest, and the party faced relentless criticism until eventually being turfed out by the far-right Tony Abbott in 2013, who then proceeded to axe even Gillard’s watered-down mining tax.
Labor’s incapacity to stand up to big business, even when it disadvantages them electorally, is no miscalculation, but a consequence of the party’s slavish support for capitalism. Despite their exemplary record as loyal servants of the system, Labor governments face perpetual suspicion from the business elite. Rather than confront capital with the organised power of workers, or even the democratic mandate of an activated working-class electorate, Labor overwhelmingly cowers when put to the test. The exceptions to this approach are rare and by nature temporary, cases where Labor’s relative independence from capital—by virtue of its roots in the union bureaucracy and its working-class voter base—means it is prepared to chart a different course. This is how we can explain Andrews’ stand during COVID.
In any case, Carroll has signified his intention is now to do exactly what the bosses want, no questions asked. In doing so, he’s mimicking the approach of Labor Premier Chris Minns in NSW and his counterpart Peter Malinauskas in South Australia. This means that the upcoming state election in Victoria will be a contest between insurgent Trumpite conspiracists, an increasingly hard-right Liberal Party (despite its friendly face) and a rightward-moving Labor machine. Workers will lose, regardless of who wins. Faced with this dire situation, the Victorian Socialists effort to build and organise the audience that exists for a fundamentally different type of politics is even more important.
