Queensland Labor is going even further to the right
The 31 October Queensland state election will be the first significant election to take place in Australia since the outbreak of the pandemic. The Palaszczuk Labor government, first elected in 2015 after Campbell Newman’s LNP government crashed after just one term, may be returned, but if they are, it will not in any way be a step forward for the working class.
In Queensland, the COVID-19 crisis has hit the tourism industry hard. Thousands of jobs have been lost as the international and, to some extent domestic, border closures have crashed the industry. In tourism towns such as Cairns, there have been empty streets and shopping malls. But outside these sectors, the economic effects of the crisis have until recently been mitigated by the JobKeeper and JobSeeker programs. Now that these are being wound back, many workers will begin to experience real hardship—but this has not yet featured as a big factor in this election. Nonetheless, unemployment is forecast to hit 9 percent by the end of this year, the second highest in the country.
The main issue in the election is the Palaszczuk government’s border closure with New South Wales. It has been an immensely popular policy among supporters of all political parties. Nonetheless, tourism operators and other small businesses on the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast have been screaming for months for the border to reopen. Their calls have been backed up by a relentless campaign by the Murdoch press, the state LNP opposition and the Morrison government, as well as the ABC.
The campaign has focused particularly on the premier, who is closely identified with the policy. Its success in preventing outbreaks of community transmission of COVID-19 has done much to bolster Labor’s chances of winning this election. The sheer popularity of the measures has forced the LNP to go quiet, boosting Labor’s credibility in having stood firm.
While the response to COVID-19 will be one of the most significant factors concerning voters, the other issue playing out is the Labor Party’s attempt to balance its urban and regional city voting bases. Half the state’s population lives outside Brisbane, and the ALP cannot win majority government without winning seats in key population centres in the state’s north, such as Cairns, Townsville, Rockhampton and Mackay.
One of the lessons Labor drew from the 2019 federal election, when votes in regional Queensland seats swung decisively toward the right-wing parties, was that the ALP could not regain lost ground in those areas unless it was seen as being strongly in favour of coal mining. So, despite the majority of Queenslanders opposing it, the Palaszczuk government gave Adani the go-ahead for its Carmichael mine immediately after the federal election.
The decision prefigured the political stance Labor has adopted in this election. Labor has gone out of its way to demonstrate its support for fossil fuels regardless of their destructive impact on the environment. Palaszczuk has announced approval for a new metallurgical coal mine in central Queensland and struck a confidential deal with Adani on a royalties holiday. Labor has drawn a line in the sand and declared that it stands on the side of big polluting capitalists. They’ve largely been let off the hook on this by Labor-oriented environmental NGOs, which largely accept Labor’s own electoralist logic.
The Palaszczuk government has continued the ALP’s traditional right-wing “law and order” platform. It has just announced an unprecedented increase in funding for new police officers—$624 million over five years to hire another 2,025 people. As police Commissioner Katarina Carroll noted, this is the biggest increase in police numbers in 30 years. With deaths in custody continuing, this expansion of policing is a slap in the face to Indigenous activists and anti-racists who have turned out in big numbers in recent years at Invasion Day rallies and at the massive protest for Black Lives Matter in June.
After some prospect that the government might stop laying criminal charges on children as young as 10, a practice that disproportionately affects Indigenous children, the government has instead doubled down on punitive “justice” policies. In June, Labor announced that “repeat youth offenders” would be refused bail.
The government’s economic policies are thoroughly conservative. It has taken advantage of the COVID-19 crisis to freeze public sector wages, something the unions, in bed with the state government, have done nothing to fight. While Labor has announced an extra $1 billion for schools and $111 million to expand the Gold Coast University Hospital, its first priority is bailing out private capitalists. The ALP has committed another $200 million to bribe Virgin Australia to keep its head office in Brisbane and has offered an undisclosed amount to union busting fossil fuel giant Glencore to maintain its copper smelting and refining in Mount Isa and Townsville.
While Labor’s commitment to fossil fuels and racist police is likely to appease conservative voters in the state’s north, it also comes with an electoral cost in some inner-city Brisbane seats, where the Greens vote has increased significantly over the last few elections. The Greens currently have one state MP and stand to win as many as four, all in Brisbane. Jackie Trad, until recently the deputy premier and treasurer before corruption scandals forced her to stand down, is almost certain to lose her South Brisbane seat to the Greens, while other inner-city areas are also under threat. The Greens’ campaign has maintained its left-wing policies of previous years, including taxing mining companies and banks to pay for publicly owned housing and renewable energy. They are likely to perform very well and could achieve a real breakthrough at this election.
The LNP seems to be struggling, since it has been unable to sink the boot into Labor about the border closures and has struggled to wedge it on law and order or its commitment to the mining industry. The latest YouGov polling puts Labor ahead 52-48 on a two-party preferred basis. While the ALP will likely be returned to office, its right-wing policies will only strengthen the state’s conservative politics. And while Labor might be able to secure regional seats for a majority in this election, in future it will have to account for the loss of Brisbane seats to the Greens.
