Labor’s problem is not personality

The ALP is an absolute disaster zone. It faces annihilation in the upcoming elections – annihilation at the hands of Tony Abbott, one of the most despised Liberal Party leaders ever.

If Labor can’t beat a disgusting reactionary like Abbott, whose whole social outlook is completely out of kilter with the mass of workers in Australia, then it should immediately be put out of its misery.

But rather than confronting the question of why they are so on the nose, why so many of their traditional working class supporters have been demoralised by the whole approach of this Labor government and why so many of them seem set to vote informal or Liberal, all the ALP powerbrokers can do is squabble over whether it should be Gillard or Rudd who will preside over the debacle.

Rudd as leader might mean that Labor will hold on to a few more seats in parliament. But leadership change will not resolve the core, underlying problems, because it is not the personality of the leader that it is to blame but the total failure of Labor to deliver for its working class supporters.

Betraying its supporters

Labor has sold its soul to the big end of town. One reflection of how far this has gone is the comments of former leading cabinet ministers Simon Crean and Martin Ferguson denouncing Gillard for supposedly engaging in “class war” rhetoric for a couple of mild criticisms of Gina Rinehart and Co.

Labor’s whole outlook is dominated by the neoliberal agenda of the rich and powerful. Everything is subordinated to the pursuit of profit, the dictates of the market and the dog-eat-dog drive to compete.

So mining companies and the big banks get away with paying virtually nothing in tax while single parent benefits are slashed, the dole is reduced to an absolute pittance, students are forced to pay more and more for their education, Aborigines are subjected to “income management”, the minimum wage is held down and basic services like health, public transport and schools are underfunded.

The result is an increasingly unequal society in which the benefits of the mining boom flow overwhelmingly into the pockets of a few billionaires like Rinehart and Twiggy Forrest while the rest of us are told to work harder and longer in increasingly insecure jobs.

Every which way you look, Labor is pursuing a reactionary agenda – maintaining the great bulk of Howard’s anti-union laws, throwing Julian Assange to the wolves, imposing a carbon tax that punishes workers rather than the big polluters, refusing to grant marriage rights to same-sex couples, boosting spending on war, locking up more refugees than even John Howard, backing Israel all the way, extending the racist Northern Territory Intervention and on and on and on.

It is not just Labor that has failed. The Greens may opportunistically at this late stage be making a few mildly critical noises, but for the last three years they have propped up the ALP. They have voted for and defended all of Labor’s budgets and refused to offer anything more than token support when people have taken to the streets to fight Labor’s attacks.

Trade union leaders

But the key reason that Labor has got away with its reactionary agenda is the failure of the trade union leadership to provide a fighting lead. The ACTU has repeatedly rolled over for the attacks by the government and the bosses or pulled the rug out from under any serious resistance.

We have truly reached the pits when ACTU president Ged Kearney could declare of Gillard and Swan’s latest budget: “This is a good budget from a reformist government which balances jobs and growth with fairness and compassion … There is much for workers and their families to be pleased about.”

On the few occasions that the union leaders have offered a lead – the construction unions against Grocon, the nurses and teachers in Victoria, for example – workers have responded enthusiastically. Indeed, whenever a union mobilises for industrial action, it is flooded with new members.

But strikes remain few and far between. The historically low levels of industrial action have enabled the bosses to keep getting away with murder and fuelled cynicism and demoralisation among millions of workers who see no alternative. Politics seems like a wretched farce, with no one prepared to stand up for the rights of the mass of people who work day in and day out to provide all the goods and services that keep society functioning.

Start the fight back now

The result of all this is that on Saturday 14 September we will almost certainly see the election of an Abbott government. Labor, the Greens and the ACTU leadership have paved the way for a Liberal government.

Whether Abbott will immediately go for the jugular like Campbell Newman in Queensland or Kennett in Victoria in the 1990s, or adopt a more cautious but no less vicious approach, we can’t know for sure. But what we do know is that we are going to have to fight. Otherwise we are going to get completely rolled over.

We are not going to defeat Abbott by “boxing clever” as the union leaders advocate, but by old style industrial militancy – all-out strikes, determined picketing, mass occupations, vibrant street protests – to lay the basis for the sort of fight back that we need to rebuild democratic rank and file organisations in the workplaces and on the campuses.

We need to start now and not wait until after the elections. The first step in fighting Abbott is to stand up to the ALP government. In the lead-up to the elections, we need to be building the planned student demonstrations against the cuts to education spending, the protests for refugee rights and for equal marriage rights and every other element of resistance.

But we also need to be building a political alternative to Labor and the Greens. We need to build a party that stands determinedly against the whole capitalist agenda, a party that fights unswervingly for the interests of workers and the oppressed, a party that spurs on every element of resistance. That’s what we in Socialist Alternative are trying to lay the basis for. Join us in the struggle!