I was recently at a meeting addressed by Premier Lara Giddings. She told a story about how as a young child she had been brought up by a rightwing father and a left wing mother – and the latter’s views prevailed as far as Lara was concerned (although her recent decisions suggest that her father is becoming increasingly more influential).
She related that when Lara was very young, she told guests at a dinner party: “Mummy says that Malcolm Fraser is a bad man. He kills children.”
Her mother assured the guests she had not put it quite like that. “Malcolm Fraser doesn’t actually kill children,” she clarified, “but he would walk them across the road without holding them by the hand.”
Lara then told the meeting that crossing the road is a metaphor for the difference between the Labor and Liberal parties. Labor believes in helping the underprivileged, so the Labor Party holds their hand when crossing the road, whereas the Liberal Party, which believes in rugged individualism, would point to the other side and say to over- and under-privileged alike: “There is the other side, you cross the road under your own steam.”
A very nice metaphor – but for what the Labor and Liberal parties stood for in the past. Our two-party system is designed around the assumption that the electorate is largely made up of two groups: employers and the employees. The right wing parties fought to advance the interests of the former, while the Labor Party claimed to fight for the interests of the latter, but also for those of the disempowered and underprivileged in general. The name of the governmental game was basically about sharing the wealth according to who the ruling party was supposed to represent, with concessions on both sides; the right recognized the need for a welfare state, and the left recognized the need to encourage industrial growth and development.
However, when Hawke and Keating swung to the right in the 1980s, espousing a free market economy and the dogmas of neo-liberalism and deregulation, the difference between the two major parties rapidly disappeared. Under deregulation, national and international corporations monopolised the so-called free markets, destroying competition and exposing the stupidity of the dogma that the economy is best regulated by market forces alone. Further, these corporations, being the richest and most powerful sector in almost all western countries today, give huge donations to both parties. Thus, as both parties in any case subscribe to the dogmas of neo-liberalism, whoever is in power legislates to provide the conditions the large corporations want.
This isn’t far from the traditional Liberal position, which has always been on the side of big business. What is a worry is that the Labor party has deserted its traditional role. It is extraordinary that senior Labor politicians, such as our Tasmanian Premier, are still holding to the we-are-for–the-underprivileged rhetoric, when all the major decisions they make say otherwise. Rather, Labor’s traditional position, of standing up for the disempowered, has been taken up by the Greens and some of the Independents.
It was evident that the audience at the meeting the Premier was addressing were not in sympathy with recent decisions by theTasmanian Government, in particular the massive cuts in front line health services, in police, in education, and in the public service generally, while the Government has spent $2 million on V8 car racing, $15 million for football games in Launceston, more in the pipeline for the AFL inHobart, and huge amounts for updating racetracks in Deloraine, Spreyton and Elwick (the last having been updated to the tune of $30 million only 5 years ago). Then there is talk of underwriting GunnsTamar Valley pulp mill and providing infrastructure for that commercially doomed venture, and financing a new woodchip mill if they can’t strong arm the new Triabunna owners to reopen that mill – and all this when the woodchip industry and forestry in general is no long economical. I could go on and on. Devastatingly inconsistent, wouldn’t you think, for a government that is dedicated to putting workers (not just timber workers) and the underprivileged first?
Not a bit of it. The Premier took such questions with equanimity. She pointed out that we would be in the black but for the GFC and the consequent loss in GST as people spent less on goods and services, thus causing Tasmania’s revenue to decline unpredictably and catastrophically. Why, then, did the Government not borrow to allow health services in particular, already in crisis, to avoid further and drastic cuts? That, we were told (as is also reported in Tasmanian Times 14/11 Lara Giddings: Taking tough budget decisions), would mean that we would shortly be in debt to the tune of $4 billion and we would need to pay $300 million p.a. in interest alone, the equivalent of the entire budget of the Launceston General Hospital.The only responsible thing to do therefore was to cut and cut again rather than go into debt.The Premier backed her argument by presenting a succession of charts – rather too quickly for them to be absorbed in the time available. But what about all those millions spent on football, horse racing and V8cars – surely they are less important than essential services?They are investments, we were told. Cut the $3 million Hawthorn AFL deal and we, or rather Launcestonians, would lose $15 million spent by sports lovers flocking to Launceston on accommodation, retail, tourism, etc.
Wrong tactic, wrong question. How could we in the audience have the information to check whether these claims are right or wrong, and mount our replies in the few minutes we had? Of course we couldn’t. It occurred to me later – too late – that the obvious tactic of getting into the nitty-gritty was doomed to fail. Politicians anticipate that and have their answers ready.
Instead, I’d like to return to Lara’s metaphor and tweak it a little. Both parties, and most shamefully Labor, now take large corporations by the hand and help them across the road, and the under-privileged and anyone else will just have to fend for themselves. This interpretation wasn’t put to her at the meeting and I am sure she would deny its appropriateness if it had been, outraged at the very suggestion. But taking corporations by the hand, at the expense of the people, is exactly what’s been happening in Tasmania under Labor since 1999.
The Tasmanian people have been overwhelmingly against clear felling of old growth forests, against increases in poker machines, and against canal estates. Back in 2001, Jim Bacon promised to listen to his forum Tasmania Together, who asked that clear-felling old growth would cease by 2003. But Jim listened instead to Gunns, who at that stage were well on the way to becoming the most powerful timber corporation in at least the Southern Hemisphere. Clear-felling greatly increased; it did not decrease as Bacon had promised it would. Despite public pressure to curb gaming, Bacon gave the Federal Group not only a 15 year monopoly on poker machines in Tasmanian hotels with an increase of 300 machines (in order to cut gambling, Bacon argued: work that one out!), but he waived the licensing fee, which cost Tasmanians about $300 million had Federal been given the same deal as other gaming businesses in Victoria had been given (as estimated by Jenni Owen of Citicorp). Paul Lennon pushed hard on behalf of Walker Corporation for the Ralphs Bay development, but fortunately people power put that one to rest. Lennon, with the complicity of both major parties, pushed the PMAA through both Houses, with its notorious Clause 11, which gives a corporation rights in law that we ordinary citizens don’t have. This gave the go ahead for Gunns’Tamar Valley pulp mill, a proposal for the mill that had not been assessed for any harmful health, environmental or economic effects – probably the most astounding Tasmanian example of political parties bending to corporate power over the welfare of ordinary people.
So Premier, and any other Labor politicians State and Federal, please don’t claim that the Labor Party is there to hold the hands of the disempowered and the under-privileged. Of course we have to have development, but only the sort of development that people want and that will improve the quality of their lives: that is what the original Australian Labor Party was all about. But it is important to add that Liberal policies would probably be even worse because they don’t even have to pretend they are there for the people. They are not and never have been: Liberal policy is to represent business interests. And if that’s the way we want the country to be run, then it is our choice to elect them to do so.
But back to Labor. As things presently stand, the only way Labor can be held to account is by the Greens and Independents. Federally, that is happening. Prime Minister Gillard has got two major items of legislation through Parliament that would seem to put human values – traditional Labor values – as top priority: the asylum seeker legislation, and carbon pricing, with action very likely on gambling. However this legislation is only there because the High Court, the Greens and Independents like Andrew Wilkie, insisted that it would be. Had Gillard got her way, children would now be languishing in prisons in a country that did not recognise human rights, and carbon pricing would be nowhere in sight. Federal Labor is embracing true Labor principles – but only because non-Labor politicians, whose values in some important respects have been values that Labor has traditionally held, forced them to.
That has worked in Canberra, so far, but I am not sure that it is working here in Tasmania. I have the impression that while the Greens’ policies have an affinity with those of traditional Labor, the elected Greens are being coopted by new Labor to the detriment of the principles of both. I would like to be corrected on that.
However, I am not arguing for the old model of Labor for the workers, Liberals for the capitalists. Society is more complex today. We have a multi-structured society, not a bipolar one. The trouble is that the major parties are in agreement over a neo-liberal model of government, whereas the majority of citizens reject that model as it disempowers them, handing power to extremely rich corporations whose sole aim is to maximize profits – and in the process they are destroying the delicately balanced environment that has hitherto sustained us all. Somehow or other, we have to develop a system of governance of the people, by the people, and for the people. But 150 years after Abraham Lincoln had proposed that explosive idea, we seem as far away as ever.
*John Biggs is a Hobart writer who occasionally airs his frustrations on TT. His latest work, Tasmania Over Five Generations: Return to Van Diemen’s Land?, is a ground level look at Tasmania’s social-political history over 180 years (to be released by Forty Degrees South shortly).
Picture: Taken by Rob Walls at Rally’s rage against the cuts, HERE
